[PATCH v3 3/4] drm/ttm: convert to unified vma offset manager

[David Herrmann]

Sorry, I forgot to CC correctly.

On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 12:53 PM, David Herrmann <dh.herrmann at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 11:13 AM, Thomas Hellstrom
> <thellstrom at vmware.com> wrote:
>> On 07/18/2013 10:54 PM, David Herrmann wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 1:24 PM, Thomas Hellstrom <thellstrom at vmware.com>
>>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> ...
>>
>>
>>>>
>>>> I think that if there are good reasons to keep locking internal, I'm fine
>>>> with that, (And also, of course, with
>>>> Daniel's proposal). Currently the add / remove / lookup paths are mostly
>>>> used by TTM during object creation and
>>>> destruction.
>>>>
>>>> However, if the lookup path is ever used by pread / pwrite, that
>>>> situation
>>>> might change and we would then like to
>>>> minimize the locking.
>>>
>>> I tried to keep the change as minimal as I could. Follow-up patches
>>> are welcome. I just thought pushing the lock into drm_vma_* would
>>> simplify things. If there are benchmarks that prove me wrong, I'll
>>> gladly spend some time optimizing that.
>>
>>
>> In the general case, one reason for designing the locking outside of a
>> utilities like this, is that different callers may have
>> different requirements. For example, the call path is known not to be
>> multithreaded at all, or
>> the caller may prefer a mutex over a spinlock for various reasons. It might
>> also be that some callers will want to use
>> RCU locking in the future if the lookup path becomes busy, and that would
>> require *all* users to adapt to RCU object destruction...
>>
>> I haven't looked at the code closely enough to say that any of this applies
>> in this particular case, though.
>
> Some notes why I went with local locking:
>  - mmap offset creation is done once and is independent of any other
> operations you might do on the BO in parallel
>  - mmap lookup is also only done once in most cases. User-space rarely
> maps a buffer twice (setup/teardown of mmaps is expensive, but keeping
> them around is very cheap). And for shared buffers only the writer
> maps it as the reader normally passes it to the kernel without
> mapping/touching it. Only for software-rendering we have two or more
> mappings of the same object.
>  - creating/mapping/destroying buffer objects is expensive in its
> current form and buffers tend to stay around for a long time
>
> I couldn't find a situation were the vma-manager was part of a
> performance critical path. But on the other hand, the paths were it is
> used are quite heavy. That's why I don't want to lock the whole buffer
> or even device. Instead, we need some "management lock" which is used
> for mmap-setup or similar things that don't affect other operations on
> the buffer or device. We don't have such a lock, so I introduced local
> locking. If we end up with more use-cases, I volunteer to refactor
> this. But I am no big fan of overgeneralizing it before more uses are
> known.
>
> Anyway, I will resend with vm_lock removed (+_unlocked() helpers) so
> we keep the status-quo regarding locks. Thanks for the comments on TTM
> buffer transfer.
>
> Thanks
> David