LS1021A performance

[Renaud Barbier <Renaud.Barbier@ametek.com>]

Hello,
I am looking into the performance of the LS1021A between Linux and Barebox and a PPC P1014

I noticed the following on md5sum calculation on 1MB file;

On Barebox, md5sum of a 1MB file in memory:
barebox@LS1021A-IOT Board:/ time md5sum /file
27a45e1d2fc461638aafce09b6397841  /file
time: 494ms

The DDR is cacheable:
barebox:/ mmuinfo 0x80000000
PAR result for 0x80000000:
 privileged read: 0x8000005c
  Physical Address [31:12]: 0x80000000
  Reserved [11]:            0x0
  Not Outer Shareable [10]: 0x0
  Non-Secure [9]:           0x0
  Impl. def. [8]:           0x0
  Shareable [7]:            0x0
  Inner mem. attr. [6:4]:   0x5 (0b101 Write-Back, Write-Allocate)
  Outer mem. attr. [3:2]:   0x3 (0b11 Write-Back, no Write-Allocate)
  SuperSection [1]:         0x0
  Failure [0]:              0x0
 privileged write: 0x8000005c
  Physical Address [31:12]: 0x80000000
  Reserved [11]:            0x0
  Not Outer Shareable [10]: 0x0
  Non-Secure [9]:           0x0
  Impl. def. [8]:           0x0
  Shareable [7]:            0x0
  Inner mem. attr. [6:4]:   0x5 (0b101 Write-Back, Write-Allocate)
  Outer mem. attr. [3:2]:   0x3 (0b11 Write-Back, no Write-Allocate)
  SuperSection [1]:         0x0
  Failure [0]:              0x0


On a Freescale P1014 (PPC)with Barebox:
time md5sum self1
f168af3541bc7109150e6be2f6c8cde4  self1
time: 57ms

On Linux:
[root@openware]# time md5sum /tmp/mtd0
26d8158619e5791859519654557aeeba  /tmp/mtd0

real    0m0.029s
user    0m0.025s
sys     0m0.001s

This is almost a 20 fold difference.

>From my In-Circuit-Emulator, the cache is enabled on both Linux and Barebox. My guess it that it comes down how the MMU is used.
Any input on how to speed up the boot loader would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Renaud