SPRUIE9D May 2017 – May 2024 DRA74P , DRA75P , DRA76P , DRA77P
The IPUx subsystem provides a multiprocessor communication interface for synchronizing tasks. The Arm processors have one output signal, TXEV (transmit event), for sending events and one input signal, RXEV (receive event), for receiving events. Figure 7-9 shows how TXEV and RXEV are connected in the IPUx subsystem.
When a WFE instruction is executed, the processor enters into sleep mode waiting for an event and continues instruction execution when an external event is received. With an SEV (send event) instruction, one processor can wake up the other processor, which is in sleep mode.
The WFE and SEV instructions can help reduce the number of iterations around a lock acquire loop (a spinlock), and thereby reduce power consumption. The basic mechanism involves an observer that is in a spinlock executing a WFE instruction, which suspends execution on that observer until an asynchronous exception or an explicit event (sent by an observer using the SEV instruction) is seen by that observer. The observer that holds the lock uses the SEV instruction to send an event after a lock is released.