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Hi,
according to this talk, cache maintenance should always be performed by VA and not by set/way except during boot or shutdown. However, invalidating/cleaning a block of data by VA requires a loop to run over the entire memory block (in steps equal to the line size). If the memory block is large (say, a frame buffer that should subsequently be read by DMA when there is no hardware cache coherency), there is a significant overhead for the loop counting alone. If the memory block is much larger than the cache, most of the maintenance operations will be NOP's because the targeted addresses aren't cached, but the software can't know that. Maintenance by set/way and a loop that iterates through all ways and sets (such as the example given on p. 8-20 of the Cortex-A Programmer's Guide) has a fixed runtime independent of the actual buffer size, and will be faster for large buffers.
A framebuffer could probably simply be marked as uncached, but that is no general solution for every use case. So, how to correctly invalidate/clean cache for large memory buffers? If I am using a single-core Cortex-A8 with no L3 cache, would set/way be correct?
Thanks,Niklas
I think you meant all the ways of a given set. Again set is an index that may be placed in one of the ways. All the ways composing an index are referred to as a set.
If you are going to do the invalidate than you may invalidate more than wanted. If it happens the data being invalidated isn't in the other caches (caches of the higher level) or the main memory than you may lose it. If you do clean and invalidate you are safe at all time.