Re: [Q] Question about memory access

[jw schultz <jw@pegasys.ws>]

On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 06:18:46PM +0200, Antonio Vargas wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 10:35:25AM +0100, Gianni Tedesco wrote:
> > On Mon, 2003-08-04 at 08:14, Cho, joon-woo wrote:
> > > If someone want to transfer large data from some device to memory, he may
> > > use DMA method.
> > > 
> > > At this point, i am confused.
> > > 
> > > I think that only one process can access physical memory(RAM) at a time.
> > 
> > The DMA controller is a dedicated piece of hardware that copies the data
> > from devices to RAM. This means that other processes can use the CPU
> > while the DMA is in progress. That is the whole point of DMA.
> 
> Yes, this is called having 2 bus masters, which are the chips that
> can use the bus to read and write to memory. What can be done is to
> timeshare the bus, for example the cpu accesses memory on odd cycles
> and the dma chip does on even cycles.
> 
> A more complex design would allow the cpu to access memory on all
> cycles, but give the dma chip more priority. This would mean that
> a dma transfer would take priority over the cpu. Think about
> a sound card reading the sound data to pump it to the speakers,
> you would prefer not to have it skip.

A few of things to ponder:

	Multiple CPUs may share the same memory.

	CPUs mostly access memory in burst mode to fill
	cache lines (usually 32 bytes) so once the
	memory begins transfer it can pump at buss speed.

	CPU-to-memory buss is clocked at speeds of
	100MHz and above.  Most newer Intel boxes have the
	memory bus clocked at 133MHz and may use DDR which
	allows transfers at double the clock rate.  That is
	~1064BG/s (less access initialisation time)

	Devices on the PCI buss are limited to the PCI bus
	speed which is typically 33 or 66 MHz.  This limits
	DMA transfers to about 120 or 240 MB/s.  So Even if
	you saturate the PCI buss there are still a lot of
	memory buss cycles left.

	Few devices are capable of saturating the PCI buss.
	In theory a medium to large RAID array could do it.
	Combining multiple Gbit NICs and RAID arrays would
	do it in practice under the right kind of loads.

	Access to the memory buss is arbitrated by a bridge
	chipset (sometimes called "North Bridge") between
	CPU, memory, AGP and other bridges.  The PCI buss
	bridge may packetise (for lack of a better word) a
	DMA transfer into multiple short bursts which
	will be fed to the North Bridge at memory buss
	speeds.

The days of interleaving DMA with CPU at the cycle level or
stalling the CPU or other device are long gone.  It is
pretty much all done in bursts mediated by a bridge
functioning as a memory controller.


-- 
________________________________________________________________
	J.W. Schultz            Pegasystems Technologies
	email address:		jw@pegasys.ws

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