Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] target/mips: Make the number of TLB entries a CPU property

[Richard Henderson]

On 10/13/20 6:25 AM, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
> Yocto developers have expressed interest in running MIPS32
> CPU with custom number of TLB:
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2020-10/msg03428.html
> 
> Help them by making the number of TLB entries a CPU property,
> keeping our set of CPU definitions in sync with real hardware.

You mean keeping the 34kf model within qemu in sync, rather than creating a
nonsense model that doesn't exist.

Question: is this cpu parameter useful for anything else?

Because the ideal solution for a CI loop is to use one of the mips cpu models
that has the hw page table walker (CP0C3_PW).  Having qemu being able to refill
the tlb itself is massively faster.

We do not currently implement a mips cpu that has the PW.  When I downloaded
the document set in 2014, I only got the mips64-pra and neglected to get the
mips32-pra.  So I don't actually know if the PW applies to mips32.  I do know
that there's nothing in the kernel that ifdefs around it.

So:

(1) anyone know if the PW incompatible with mips32?
(2) if not, was there any mips32 hw built with PW
    that we could model?
(3) if not, would a cpu parameter to force-enable PW
    for any r2+ cpu be more useful that frobbing the
    number of tlb entries?


r~