Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Kay-Uwe Kasemir wrote:
> 
> Sounds like another way of forcing electrons out of the CPU
> - if not even better than __asm__ volatile ("sync").

eieio is likely to be quicker - IIRC the sync causes the instruction
pipeline to be stalled until the write is done as well, which isn't
strictly necessary in this case (but useful when installing new CPU
instructions).

> But what about the Universe II chip on most PPC boards
> which has its own write pipeline?
> Is there a "flush" register/command on it?

IIRC there's a bit somewhere that claims to show whether the write
pipeline is empty, but when I tried putting code into the Universe
interrupt handler to wait for this after running each ISR it made no
difference to the "bad vme interrupt 0" error messages we were getting. 
The dummy read is the correct technique, as it also works on the Motorola
68K boards that have a VMEchip2 if that's set to do write pipelining.

> (2) the fact that the memory regions mapped to VME are configured as "not cacheable"
>     in the vxWorks BSP's sysPhysMemDesc

BTW, I also mark our VME regions as Guarded, which supposedly prevents the
CPU from changing the order of writes to that address region.  I'm not
sure if it makes any difference IRL, but it certainly makes me happier
after having read about the possibility.

- Andrew
-- 
Larry McVoy: "Learn how to think in C++ but don't ever program in it."

References:

Re: ISEG VHQ204L Driver J. Frederick Bartlett ([email protected])

Re: ISEG VHQ204L Driver (Really: PPC and VME) Kay-Uwe Kasemir

Navigate by Date:

Prev: Re: ISEG VHQ204L Driver (Really: PPC and VME) Kay-Uwe Kasemir

Next: epicsBase3.13.7 Marty Kraimer

Index: 1994  1995  1996  1997  1998  1999  2000  2001  <2002>  2003  2004  2005  2006  2007  2008  2009  2010  2011  2012  2013  2014  2015  2016  2017  2018  2019  2020  2021  2022  2023  2024 

Navigate by Thread:

Prev: Re: ISEG VHQ204L Driver (Really: PPC and VME) Kay-Uwe Kasemir

Next: switch clock Bernd Schoeneburg

Index: 1994  1995  1996  1997  1998  1999  2000  2001  <2002>  2003  2004  2005  2006  2007  2008  2009  2010  2011  2012  2013  2014  2015  2016  2017  2018  2019  2020  2021  2022  2023  2024