A Processor-DMA-Based Memory Copy Hardware Accelerator

For many Operating Systems and device drivers, memory copy is the most time-consuming operation which has always been paid special attention. In this paper, we propose a processor DMA based memory copy hardware accelerator with the goal to reduce the instructions executed on CPU, and exploit the parallelism between computing and data transfer in memory copy. This is accomplished by taking advantage of a proposed Direct Memory Access (DMA) engine in the processor which overcomes many conventional DMA engine shortcomings. Experimental results show that the proposed hardware solution achieves a speedup of 14.79 compared with the optimized software solution and an overlap of 81.8% in computing and data transfer on average.