On Wed, Dec 08, 2010 at 05:27:39PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
Sorry - should have included more info from the original posting.
The boot time speedup is the most critical. From the original mail:
...
The following experimental patch changes the kernel mapping for ACPI tables
to CACHED. This eliminates the page attibute conflict & allows users to map
the tables CACHEABLE. This significantly speeds up boot:
38 minutes without the patch
27 minutes with the patch
~30% improvement
...
(Since the original posting, we've made additional reductions in
boot times. The absolute improvement from this patch is still the same
but the percentage improvement is now larger).
This is on a large SGI system. Boot time is reduced on smaller systems
but obviously the improvement is much less.
See the original mail for more details.
Len - the original patch had the cached/uncached mapping controlled by a
platform attribute (I'm paranoid). However, the community concensus was
that cached mappings were safe for all platforms.
--- jack
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