[OpenBIOS] L2 Cache Settings

[Jd Lyons]

> On Jan 26, 2018, at 8:00 PM, Segher Boessenkool <segher at kernel.crashing.org> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 05:04:02AM -0500, Jd Lyons wrote:
>>> On Jan 25, 2018, at 1:38 PM, Segher Boessenkool <segher at kernel.crashing.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Thu, Jan 25, 2018 at 11:09:31AM -0500, Jd Lyons wrote:
>>>> Segher, if you have some of the old White Papers on the CPU’s that shipped in Mac’s, or the upgrades offered by third parties, I’d like to get a look at them, if your not under NDA.
>>> 
>>> You can download this CPU documentation from NPX (who bought it from
>>> FSL, and before it was Motorola).  Those are good docs.
>> 
>> Thanks, I did a few half hearted google searches, that didn’t yield the docs, I figured they we still around somewhere. Sometimes goole is obtuse, it’s like the computer from the Hitchhikers Guide, it matters how you ask the question.
> 
> (It probably does not help that is mistyped NXP).
> 
> 7447a filetype:pdf   is an easy way to find it (you want the "reference
> manual" most).
> 
>> I wonder, in specific to emulating caches if that yields any performance increase.
> 
> Probably not.  Your host's memory access do not get any faster, and the
> increased bookkeeping will not help.
> 
>> 32 bit PPC is never going to get any faster,
> 
> Most (all?) 64-bit PowerPC cores can run 32-bit code just fine.
> 
>> With qemu-ppc I find the integer performance very well maintained, it seems to scale well with the host cpu, tho the FPU and the Vec units are woeful and need a lot of work.
> 
> The FPU can not be cheaply emulated at all on x86 (probably not on Arm
> either, not sure).  The most obvious thing that cannot be cheaply emulated
> is fmadd (fused multiply add).
> 
> Some vector operations are hard to do, too (in addition to the float ones).
> 
>> It seems like it could be a challenge to emulate caches, I’ll have to dig deeper into qemu and see how the issue is dealt with. 
> 
> Well, it probably should at least make the L2CR etc. registers work as
> expected; they do not necessarily actually have to *do* anything, esp. not
> if you only want to emulate the architectural state (so don't care about
> for example emulating cache invalidate correctly where that is undefined
> behaviour in the architecture, etc.)
> 
> 
> Segher

Seems I’m back to this, for some reason BootX or mach_kernel is:

> When I try to boot OS X in qemu-system-ppc with -enable-kvm -cpu host Apple’s BootX hangs at Call Kernel!
> 
> I’m using a PowerBook6,8 with a 7447a v1.5 and Kernel 4.4.111.
> 
> When BootX hangs, I get this in dmesg:
> 
> kvmppc_handle_exit_pr: emulation at 92808 failed ( 7dbafaa6 )

7dbaffa6 is mfspr r13,1018, and SPR 1018 on the 7447A is L3CR, the
level 3 cache control register.  The boot code is presumably wanting
to do something to the L3 cache configuration.

> Can anyone help explain what this error means, so I can figure out what it triggering it, and hopefully fix the issue.

You could try adding code to kvmppc_core_emulate_mfspr_pr() and
kvmppc_core_emulate_mtspr_pr() to implement it as a dummy SPR that
ignores writes and returns zero when read.  That should work unless
the BootX code does something like waiting for some bit to come back
as a 1.

Paul.

I’m not really sure, meaning I have no idea to do what Paul is suggesting, but I assume it means recompiling my kernel, as I didn’t build KVM as a module. Even then, I just don’t know how to do create a dummy SPR.

I was hoping I could take a shortcut, with some Openbios hacks.

To start with I want to create a child to the CPU, the L2 cache, and see if that is enough to get OS X to stop trying to access an L3 cache that doesn’t exist. I checked the L3CR, and it is, of course not writable.

So the properties of the L2 I need to add are:

Under the CPU:

l2-cache /cpus/PowerPC,G4 at 0/l2-cache
l2cr 80000000

I tried:

dev /cpus/@0
“ /cpus/PowerPC,G4 at 0/l2-cache” encode-string “ l2-cache” property
80000000 encode-int “ l2cr” property

Segher, this doesn’t seem quite right, as it does create the l2-cache property, but it’s in quotes. I think what I need to do here is create and alias rather than a string?  

The l2cr property seems correct.

The I need to create a child to the CPU, but I’m not sure how to do that, Segher?

The child needs to have these properties:

name l2-cache
device-type cache
i-cache-size 00080000
d-cache-size 00080000
i-cache-sets 00000200
d-cache-sets 00000200
i-cache-line-size 00000040
d-cache-line-size 00000040
cache-unified
clock-frequency 59682efa

I’m pretty sure I know how to create these properties, I just don’t know how to create the l2-cache node as a child to the cpu at 0.

 
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