[RFC PATCH 00/10] Xe DRM scheduler and long running workload plans

[Matthew Brost]

On Tue, Apr 04, 2023 at 10:07:48AM +0900, Asahi Lina wrote:
> Hi, thanks for the Cc!
> 

No problem.

> On 04/04/2023 09.22, Matthew Brost wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > As a prerequisite to merging the new Intel Xe DRM driver [1] [2], we
> > have been asked to merge our common DRM scheduler patches first as well
> > as develop a common solution for long running workloads with the DRM
> > scheduler. This RFC series is our first attempt at doing this. We
> > welcome any and all feedback.
> > 
> > This can we thought of as 4 parts detailed below.
> > 
> > - DRM scheduler changes for 1 to 1 relationship between scheduler and
> > entity (patches 1-3)
> > 
> > In Xe all of the scheduling of jobs is done by a firmware scheduler (the
> > GuC) which is a new paradigm WRT to the DRM scheduler and presents
> > severals problems as the DRM was originally designed to schedule jobs on
> > hardware queues. The main problem being that DRM scheduler expects the
> > submission order of jobs to be the completion order of jobs even across
> > multiple entities. This assumption falls apart with a firmware scheduler
> > as a firmware scheduler has no concept of jobs and jobs can complete out
> > of order. A novel solution for was originally thought of by Faith during
> > the initial prototype of Xe, create a 1 to 1 relationship between scheduler
> > and entity. I believe the AGX driver [3] is using this approach and
> > Boris may use approach as well for the Mali driver [4].
> > 
> > To support a 1 to 1 relationship we move the main execution function
> > from a kthread to a work queue and add a new scheduling mode which
> > bypasses code in the DRM which isn't needed in a 1 to 1 relationship.
> > The new scheduling mode should unify all drivers usage with a 1 to 1
> > relationship and can be thought of as using scheduler as a dependency /
> > infligt job tracker rather than a true scheduler.
> 
> Yup, we're in the exact same situation with drm/asahi, so this is very
> welcome! We've been using the existing scheduler as-is, but this should help
> remove some unneeded complexity in this use case.
>

That's the idea.

> Do you want me to pull in this series into our tree and make sure this all
> works out for us?
>

We tested this in Xe and it definitely works for us but the more testing
the better.

> I also have a couple bugfixes for drm/sched I need to send out, but I think
> the rebase/merge with this series should be trivial. I'll send that out this
> week.
> 
> > - Generic messaging interface for DRM scheduler
> > 
> > Idea is to be able to communicate to the submission backend with in band
> > (relative to main execution function) messages. Messages are backend
> > defined and flexable enough for any use case. In Xe we use these
> > messages to clean up entites, set properties for entites, and suspend /
> > resume execution of an entity [5]. I suspect other driver can leverage
> > this messaging concept too as it a convenient way to avoid races in the
> > backend.
> 
> We haven't needed this so far (mostly by using fine-grained locking and
> refcounting all over the place) but I can see it being useful to simplify
> some of those constructs and maybe avoid potential deadlocks in some places.
> I'm not sure yet whether we can fully get rid of the main queue
> refcounting/locking (our completion/error signaling path doesn't map well to
> DMA fences directly so we still need something there to get from the global
> GPU completion signaling thread to individual queues) but it might be a step
> in the right direction at least!
>

With this messaging interface we essentially have a lockless submission
backend which is really nice compared to what we did in the i915.

Matt

> ~~ Lina
>