RISC-V: Probe for unaligned access speed

Rather than deferring unaligned access speed determinations to a vendor
function, let's probe them and find out how fast they are. If we
determine that an unaligned word access is faster than N byte accesses,
mark the hardware's unaligned access as "fast". Otherwise, we mark
accesses as slow.

The algorithm itself runs for a fixed amount of jiffies. Within each
iteration it attempts to time a single loop, and then keeps only the best
(fastest) loop it saw. This algorithm was found to have lower variance from
run to run than my first attempt, which counted the total number of
iterations that could be done in that fixed amount of jiffies. By taking
only the best iteration in the loop, assuming at least one loop wasn't
perturbed by an interrupt, we eliminate the effects of interrupts and
other "warm up" factors like branch prediction. The only downside is it
depends on having an rdtime granular and accurate enough to measure a
single copy. If we ever manage to complete a loop in 0 rdtime ticks, we
leave the unaligned setting at UNKNOWN.

There is a slight change in user-visible behavior here. Previously, all
boards except the THead C906 reported misaligned access speed of
UNKNOWN. C906 reported FAST. With this change, since we're now measuring
misaligned access speed on each hart, all RISC-V systems will have this
key set as either FAST or SLOW.

Currently, we don't have a way to confidently measure the difference between
SLOW and EMULATED, so we label anything not fast as SLOW. This will
mislabel some systems that are actually EMULATED as SLOW. When we get
support for delegating misaligned access traps to the kernel (as opposed
to the firmware quietly handling it), we can explicitly test in Linux to
see if unaligned accesses trap. Those systems will start to report
EMULATED, though older (today's) systems without that new SBI mechanism
will continue to report SLOW.

I've updated the documentation for those hwprobe values to reflect
this, specifically: SLOW may or may not be emulated by software, and FAST
represents means being faster than equivalent byte accesses. The change
in documentation is accurate with respect to both the former and current
behavior.

Signed-off-by: Evan Green <evan@rivosinc.com>
Acked-by: Conor Dooley <conor.dooley@microchip.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230818194136.4084400-2-evan@rivosinc.com
Signed-off-by: Palmer Dabbelt <palmer@rivosinc.com>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 6 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/riscv/hwprobe.rst b/Documentation/riscv/hwprobe.rst
index 19165ebd82ba..f63fd05f1a73 100644
--- a/Documentation/riscv/hwprobe.rst
+++ b/Documentation/riscv/hwprobe.rst
@@ -87,13 +87,12 @@ The following keys are defined:
     emulated via software, either in or below the kernel.  These accesses are
     always extremely slow.
 
-  * :c:macro:`RISCV_HWPROBE_MISALIGNED_SLOW`: Misaligned accesses are supported
-    in hardware, but are slower than the cooresponding aligned accesses
-    sequences.
+  * :c:macro:`RISCV_HWPROBE_MISALIGNED_SLOW`: Misaligned accesses are slower
+    than equivalent byte accesses.  Misaligned accesses may be supported
+    directly in hardware, or trapped and emulated by software.
 
-  * :c:macro:`RISCV_HWPROBE_MISALIGNED_FAST`: Misaligned accesses are supported
-    in hardware and are faster than the cooresponding aligned accesses
-    sequences.
+  * :c:macro:`RISCV_HWPROBE_MISALIGNED_FAST`: Misaligned accesses are faster
+    than equivalent byte accesses.
 
   * :c:macro:`RISCV_HWPROBE_MISALIGNED_UNSUPPORTED`: Misaligned accesses are
     not supported at all and will generate a misaligned address fault.