[PATCH] eal: non-temporal memcpy

[Stanislaw Kardach]

On Mon, Oct 10, 2022 at 11:36:11AM +0200, Morten Brørup wrote:
<snip>
> > For large copies, which I'm guessing is what non-temporal stores are
> > usually used for, this is hair splitting. For DPDK applications, it
> > might well be at least somewhat relevant, because such an application
> > may make an enormous amount of copies, each roughly the size of a
> > packet.
> > 
> > If we had a rte_memcpy_ex() that only cared about copying whole cache
> > line in a NT manner, the application could add a clflushopt (or the
> > equivalent) after the copy, flushing the the beginning and end cache
> > line of the destination buffer.
> 
> That is a good idea.
> 
> Furthermore, POWER and RISC-V don't have NT store, but if they have a cache line flush instruction, NT destination memcpy could be implemented for those architectures too - i.e. storing cache line sized blocks and flushing the cache, and letting the application flush the cache lines at the ends, if useful for the application.

On RISC-V all stores are from a register (scalar or vector) to a memory
location. So is the reasoning behind flushing the cache line to free it
up to other data?

Other than that there is a ratified RISC-V extension for cache
management operations (including flush) - Zicbom.
NT load/store hints are being worked on right now.

-- 
Best Regards,
Stanislaw Kardach