Jerome Forissier <jerome.forissier@linaro.org> says:
This series introduces threads and uses them to improve the performance
of the USB bus scanning code and to implement background jobs in the
shell via two new commands: 'spawn' and 'wait'.
The threading framework is called 'uthread' and is inspired from the
barebox threads [2]. setjmp() and longjmp() are used to save and
restore contexts, as well as a non-standard extension called initjmp().
This new function is added in several patches, one for each
architecture that supports HAVE_SETJMP. A new symbol is defined:
HAVE_INITJMP. Two tests, one for initjmp() and one for the uthread
scheduling, are added to the lib suite.
After introducing threads and making schedule() and udelay() a thread
re-scheduling point, the USB stack initialization is modified to benefit
from concurrency when UTHREAD is enabled, where uthreads are used in
usb_init() to initialize and scan multiple busses at the same time.
The code was tested on arm64 and arm QEMU with 4 simulated XHCI buses
and some devices. On this platform the USB scan takes 2.2 s instead of
5.6 s. Tested on i.MX93 EVK with two USB hubs, one ethernet adapter and
one webcam on each, "usb start" takes 2.4 s instead of 4.6 s.
Finally, the spawn and wait commands are introduced, allowing the use of
threads from the shell. Tested on the i.MX93 EVK with a spinning HDD
connected to USB1 and the network connected to ENET1. The USB plus DHCP
init sequence "spawn usb start; spawn dhcp; wait" takes 4.5 seconds
instead of 8 seconds for "usb start; dhcp".
[1] https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/uboot/list/?series=446674
[2] https://github.com/barebox/barebox/blob/master/common/bthread.c
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250418141114.2056981-1-jerome.forissier@linaro.org
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