PS4 Pro DDR3 Read Speed Raised From 10.6 MB/s to 504 MB/s via DMA Patch

A developer working on Linux for the PS4 Pro found that reads from its DDR3 memory were capped near 10.6 MB/s because the CPU fetched data in tiny 8-byte chunks through a narrow PCI window. The chip's southbridge contains a DMA engine that could handle the transfers, but no Linux driver existed for it, and Sony's gameOS driver is closed-source. The developer reverse-engineered the kernel binary to recover the chip's address mapping and the DMA command sequence. A patch was then built that binds the engine as a PCI device and routes transfers through a coherent buffer allocated at startup. Reported results show reads improving to about 504 MB/s and writes to about 425 MB/s, with the engine capable of roughly 1.4 GB/s.
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