Rockbox

  • Status Closed
  • Percent Complete
    100%
  • Task Type Patches
  • Category Operating System/Drivers
  • Assigned To No-one
  • Operating System Another
  • Severity Low
  • Priority Very Low
  • Reported Version Version 3.2
  • Due in Version Undecided
  • Due Date Undecided
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Attached to Project: Rockbox
Opened by FlynDice - 2009-05-07
Last edited by funman - 2009-05-26

FS#10191 - AMSSansa Synchronous Clocking

While trying to get the mmu working correctly I managed to get a synchronous clocking scheme to work and thought I would post it for comments. This is probably more of a proof of concept type of thing but I figure it can’t hurt to test it out and see how it compares to the current asynchronous clocking scheme. I have left the assembler routines embedded in the .c code to simplify things and also enabled round robin caching.

Closed by  funman
2009-05-26 18:45
Reason for closing:  Duplicate
Additional comments about closing:   Warning: Undefined array key "typography" in /home/rockbox/flyspray/plugins/dokuwiki/inc/parserutils.php on line 371 Warning: Undefined array key "camelcase" in /home/rockbox/flyspray/plugins/dokuwiki/inc/parserutils.php on line 407

 FS#10245  is more complete, and committed

When I tested the synchronous clocking setup I discovered it was faster than the current svn asynchronous so I cleaned it up a bit for version 2. I get a slight (10 MHz) improvement over svn with test_codec and a pretty substantial(40%) increase in fps with test_fps.

sko commented on 2009-05-10 08:40

With the first patch I noticed that rb is not always booting (nearly every fifth boot failed) but with the new patch it works. I noticed some things:
- playing mp3 needs 40 to 50 MHz less than svn
- the “spacerocks-wheel-bug” (http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=14064.msg149120#msg149120) is gone
- playback stops when starting pictureflow plugin (in svn pictureflow works with playback)

Playback works with pictureflow now. I believe that issue was not related to this patch. I have had exactly one instance of this not booting and it was with the microsd installed. It has booted normally every other time(probably close to 30 -40 times now).

I’m probably missing something here - if so sorry :)
But if you dynamically change the PCLK frequency (in set_cpu_frequency), don’t you also need to dynamically change the divisors for the clocks that are derived from PCLK (I2C for example)?

No, you are most certainly not missing anything, that was also my thought initially but when I tried to adjust the other divisors I got strange results. My thinking is that all of the peripherals that are based off of PCLK get their initial divisor based on the 62MHz in clock-target.h. and the reference frequency we give them there. So when I run PCLK at half speed, all those peripheral speeds are now half speed which I believe is still within their frequency range. I never adjust PLLA so anything that is not clocked off of PCLK or FCLK should not change. That was my reasoning at least but I surely encourage you to tear it apart and improve it!

I haven’t looked at the peripheral clocks yet. I was thinking about a slightly different strategy for sync clocking. I wondered about leaving the mode as sync for both normal and boost, and using PCLK_DIV1_SEL to take the PCLK from 62MHz to 31MHz while leaving the SDRAM clock mpmc_clk running at 62MHz. I’ve tried it on my e260v2 and it seems to work OK. What do you think? I’ve attached a patch.

I have had a chance to try your patch and my suggestion back to back. Yours seems way more responsive when the FCLK is not boosted. So maybe mine is not such a good idea.. not sure why yet.

“Yours seems way more responsive when the FCLK is not boosted”

Well I figured it out.. Seems I’ve performed a bit of cold fusion here! I was adjusting the wrong divider for FCLK. Instead of dividing by it by 2 I was multiplying by 7/8. Hence the nice performance. Here’s a patch with the correct dividers or you can just change CGU_PROC |= (1« 2); to CGU_PROC |= (1« 4);

Me also! «5 instead of « 6 when trying to adjust PCLK_DIV1_SEL. ‘Code in haste, repent at leisure’ - or something… It just crashes when I adjust PCLK_DIV1_SEL. Trying to work out why.

Following my last ill considered patch - here’s one I thought about more carefully. I’m afraid it’s a bit untidy because of the compile time macros I used to test different clock configs.
I also used FlynDice’s synchronous_clocking_3.patch, and his very useful HW info patch from the forum AMS thread. I tested against SVN:20931.
I made some measurements of MP3 decode performance (boosted), and LCD update rates (unboosted). I’m interested in the latter because my e260v2 UI performance is a bit laggy, and I was interested in the least bad option.
Sync clocking seems to give ~5% increase in MP3 decode performance.
Sync clocking also seems to give ~25% better unboosted LCD update rates than fastbus, although the comparison might not be fair, since the sync option uses an FCLK/PCLK of 62/31MHz, but fastbus effectively uses the same 31Mhz for both. In anycase, it is worth changing the DBOP_CLK divisor for the unboosted state, as it gives a significant improvement to UI usability. Vanilla 20931 also gives similar UI performance, but the unboosted clock config seems to be illegal (i.e. async awith PCLK > FCLK).
My original scheme to have FCLK=MPMC_CLK=61MHz, PCLK=31MHz fails to boot. I need to read some more about the MPMC to understand why.
I have attached detailed results.

“My original scheme to have FCLK=MPMC_CLK=61MHz, PCLK=31MHz” should read “My original scheme to have FCLK=MPMC_CLK=_62_MHz, PCLK=31MHz”

in my previous tests, I could never boot with mpmc_clk != pclk.

It seems that the OF uses a 65MHz limit for mpmc_clk, but I’m not 100% sure since there is a lot of code related to pclk that I didn’t understand.

Here is a patch which uses synchronous clocking when boosted, and fastbus when unboosted.

The battery bench comparison can be found at http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=14064.msg150619#msg150619

Do you have objections for it going to SVN ?

sko commented on 2009-05-26 15:28

The last patch is working very well:
- playing mp3 needs much less MHz (average about 75 MHz on my 128 kBit/s files and average about 115 MHz on my 320 kBit/s files)
- ui-responding is perfect

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