Re: rep movsb vs. simpler instructions for memcpy/memmove

Michael S wrote:

On Thu, 13 Mar 2025 21:42:25 GMT
scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) wrote:
 

Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> writes:

On Thu, 13 Mar 2025 19:35:33 +0000
mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1) wrote:
 

>
And they have "So Many" extra burdens, such as when from is MMI/O
space access and to is cache coherent, and all sorts of other self
imposed problems.

>
This case is pretty useful in practice.

>
Although mostly done with DMA controllers in these modern times
to offload from the CPU.
>

 For up to few hundreds bytes it would be slower. For few thousands byte
it could be faster at transfer level, but data ends up in the wrong
place in the memory hierarchy, too far away from the ultimate consumer,
so still slower from the "full job done" perspective.
And CPU time that you "saved" by offload is almost always just uselessly
wasted in idle loop.
 

 

Using MTRRs one can switch the kind of memory
to and from point in the middle of a REP MOVs.

>
How exactly?

>
The REP MOV straddles the boundary between two MTRRs.
>

 Crossing boundary that way can typically be predicted far in advance,
so not really big problem.
I think, Mitch had something less mundane in mind.

Yeah, I read it as some other core modifying the relevant MTTRs in the middle of the ongoing block move.
The solution seems somewhat obvious, i.e any modification of an MTTR which is involved in the move wil cause a hw interrupt. Upon restarting the remainder of the move, the new MTTR rules apply?
The alternative would be to specify that any block move is atomic as seen from the MTTR rules, i.e the update(s) only apply after the move has finished?
Terje
--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"