A new version of U-Boot is out (here the announcement). U-Boot is a bootloader that aims to be flexible enough to be adapted to work on any architecture. This version (2010.09, that can be downloaded from their FTP server) adds Cache support to ARM architectures. The developers reported a couple of performance tests on a Beagle Board, and the results are, briefly:
| Instruction Cache | OFF | ON | ON |
| Data Cache | OFF | OFF | ON |
| Loading 127MB | 116s | 106s | 30.3s |
| Unzip 32MiB | 1.84s | 1.64s | 0.12s |
The results show that common operations performed at boot time, such as copying zipped kernel images and initial RAM disks and then uncompressing them, will get a speed boost from this version on.
Posted in: Embedded
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naveen
2010/11/19
Hi,
Seems a valuble piece of statistics.
I’m a newbi, I would like to know the process of setting up the caches and MMU in the u-boot.
Googling gave me few links.
I’m unable to understand them, Any suggetions of where should be starting.
Will be thankful for your Guidence
Balau
2010/11/20
Hello,
To enable/disable the caches the “dcache” and “icache” commands can be used from the u-boot command line. The implementation depends on the CPU. You can find more details in the patches:
Some more details are present in the official ARM infocenter, in particular: