Honored ContributorHi...i am tring to copy memory from sram to sdram using dma.
For some reason some of the data dosent transfered... Are there any suggestions what to look for to solve this problem? Thanks. Asaf
Honored ContributorTry SGDMA - works fine.
Honored ContributorMight be caused by the cpu reading data from the data cache, and/or writing dirty cache lines back over the copied data.
Honored Contributordoes the sgdma has the same functions
Honored Contributorhow can I fix the dirty cache lines?
Honored ContributorI'm assuming you are trying to do something like this:
1) Using Nios II to populate some buffer in memory (lets call this buffer A) 2) DMA data from buffer A to another buffer (lets call this buffer B ) 3) Using Nios II to read back buffer B Doing this the data written in# 1 should be the same as the data read back in# 3 but due to the cache this isn't happen. So for# 1 to be safe you need to ensure the data is not cached and reaches the memory. There are two ways you can do this, A) if you are using pointers remap the pointer to be a cache bypassing pointer, or B ) after you write to the buffer perform a cache flush (just flush the range of address where your buffer resides in memory). When this is done then you can start the DMA. For# 3 to be safe (just in case you have previously read from the buffer B locations previously) you can do something similar. Either flush those locations before the DMA transfer, or use a cache bypassing pointer to access the data after the DMA transfer. Depending on your memory latencies and buffer sizes one method will be better than the other. For example if the buffers were on-chip memory using cache bypassing pointers is probably the way to go. If it was SDRAM then flushing ranges of the data cache would probably be better due to the high latency.Honored ContributorThanks..can you please give me an example to do that?
And about rhe agdma..i couldnt find a memory to memory example. Can someone give me an example? ThanksHonored ContributorThanks...i.used the flush and malloc.
I can see that the addresses in signal tap. Sometimes the address jumps by more then 1..what are the reasonsHonored ContributorFirstly do tests with on-chip memory and enable memory content editor function. You'll be able to see memory contents live.
Honored ContributorIf you are getting memory with malloc() that is either uncached, or for which you are doing explicit cache operations, you do need to make sure that you only use a cache-aligned part of the buffer.
The altera function to malloc() uncached data doesn't stop the cache line being shared!Honored ContributorIf you want to always bypass the cache with the allocated pointers then I recommend using the uncached version of malloc. I forget what it's called but it's most likely "uncache_malloc". If you search through the software handbook you should be able to find it where all the other cache bypassing APIs are located. Using uncache_malloc will ensure that the data cache gets flushed before you attempt to use the pointer to avoid the issue dsl is talking about. The cache/uncache remapping APIs should do the same thing safely for you as well.
*edit* Also do you need to allocate pointers? I usually try to avoid malloc since I don't like debugging stack and heap collisions :)
