Dynamic Adaptation of Direct Memory Transfer in a Data Processing System with Mismatched Data-bus Widths

摘要

A method and apparatus for controlling direct memory transfer (DMT) in a data processing system with mismatched bus-widths in which a home node automatically determines, from a read request received from a requestor node, whether DMT should be enabled or disabled dependent on the bus-widths of the requestor node and a target slave node and on the size of the access. Optionally, when the slave node has a smaller bus width than the requestor node, a data combiner at an upload port for the target slave node merges two or more data beats of requested data received from the target slave node to form a single wider beat and transmits the single wider beat to the requestor node. A counter may be used to determine when a data buffer in the data combiner has sufficient space to store data beats to be merged.