about mmap dma-buf and sync

[Thomas Hellstrom]

On 08/21/2015 03:32 PM, Jerome Glisse wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 07:25:07AM +0200, Thomas Hellstrom wrote:
>> On 08/20/2015 10:34 PM, Jerome Glisse wrote:
>>> On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 09:39:12PM +0200, Thomas Hellstrom wrote:
>>>> On 08/20/2015 04:53 PM, Jerome Glisse wrote:
>>>>> On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 08:48:23AM +0200, Thomas Hellstrom wrote:
>>>>>> Hi, Tiago!
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On 08/20/2015 12:33 AM, Tiago Vignatti wrote:
>>>>>>> Hey Thomas, you haven't answered my email about making SYNC_* mandatory:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__lists.freedesktop.org_archives_dri-2Ddevel_2015-2DAugust_088376.html&d=BQIDAw&c=Sqcl0Ez6M0X8aeM67LKIiDJAXVeAw-YihVMNtXt-uEs&r=vpukPkBtpoNQp2IUKuFviOmPNYWVKmen3Jeeu55zmEA&m=EX3w8PM79N5qLeXyogeSPN9J5pIvBV6IKrhBjzwJDEM&s=S3NqF0kPNtBKQ3-WiffL2T9NFK96XBp56vkb3ujf-io&e= 
>>>>>> Hmm, for some reason it doesn't show up in my mail app, but I found it
>>>>>> in the archives. An attempt to explain the situation from the vmwgfx
>>>>>> perspective.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The fact that the interface is generic means that people will start
>>>>>> using it for the zero-copy case. There has been a couple of more or less
>>>>>> hackish attempts to do this before, and if it's a _driver_ interface we
>>>>>> don't need to be that careful but if it is a _generic_ interface we need
>>>>>> to be very careful to make it fit *all* the hardware out there and that
>>>>>> we make all potential users use the interface in a way that conforms
>>>>>> with the interface specification.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> What will happen otherwise is that apps written for coherent fast
>>>>>> hardware might, for example, ignore calling the SYNC api, just because
>>>>>> the app writer only cared about his own hardware on which the app works
>>>>>> fine. That would fail miserably if the same app was run on incoherent
>>>>>> hardware, or the incoherent hardware driver maintainers would be forced
>>>>>> to base an implementation on page-faults which would be very slow.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> So assume the following use case: An app updates a 10x10 area using the
>>>>>> CPU on a 1600x1200 dma-buf, and it will then use the dma-buf for
>>>>>> texturing. On some hardware the dma-buf might be tiled in a very
>>>>>> specific way, on vmwgfx the dma-buf is a GPU buffer on the host, only
>>>>>> accessible using DMA. On vmwgfx the SYNC operation must carry out a
>>>>>> 10x10 DMA from the host GPU buffer to a guest CPU buffer before the CPU
>>>>>> write and a DMA back again after the write, before GPU usage. On the
>>>>>> tiled architecture the SYNC operation must untile before CPU access and
>>>>>> probably tile again before GPU access.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> If we now have a one-dimensional SYNC api, in this particular case we'd
>>>>>> either need to sync a far too large area (1600x10) or call SYNC 10 times
>>>>>> before writing, and then again after writing. If the app forgot to call
>>>>>> SYNC we must error.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> So to summarize, the fact that the interface is generic IMO means:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 1) Any user must be able to make valid assumptions about the internal
>>>>>> format of the dma-buf. (untiled, color format, stride etc.)
>>>>>> 2) Any user *must* call SYNC before and after CPU access. On coherent
>>>>>> architectures, the SYNC is a NULL operation anyway, and that should be
>>>>>> documented somewhere so that maintainers of drivers of uncoherent
>>>>>> architectures have somewhere to point their fingers.
>>>>>> 3) Driver-specific implementations must be allowed to error (segfault)
>>>>>> if SYNC has not been used.
>>>>> I think here you are too lax, the common code must segfault or
>>>>> error badly if SYNC has not been use in all cases even on cache
>>>>> coherent arch. The device driver sync callback can still be a
>>>>> no operation. But i think that we need to insist strongly on a
>>>>> proper sync call being made (and we should forbid empty area
>>>>> sync call). This would be the only way to make sure userspace
>>>>> behave properly as otherwise we endup in the situation you were
>>>>> describing above, where the app is design on a cache coherent
>>>>> arch and works fine there but broke in subtle way on non cache
>>>>> coherent arch and app developer is clueless of why.
>>>>>
>>>>> I just do not trust userspace.
>>>> I agree and ideally i'd want it this way as well. The question is, is it
>>>> possible? Can this be done without a fault() handler in the generic
>>>> kernel code?
>>>>
>>>>>> 4) The use-case stated above clearly shows the benefit of a
>>>>>> 2-dimensional sync interface (we want to sync the 10x10 region), but
>>>>>> what if someone in the future wants to use this interface for a 3D
>>>>>> texture? Will a 2D sync suffice? Can we make the SYNC interface
>>>>>> extendable in a way that an enum sync_type member defines the layout of
>>>>>> the argument, and initially we implement only 1d, 2d sync, leaving 3d
>>>>>> for the future?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Also, I agree there is probably no good way to generically implement an
>>>>>> error if SYNC has not been called. That needs to be left as an option to
>>>>>> drivers.
>>>>> I think there is, just forbid any further use of the dma buffer, mark
>>>>> it as invalid and printk a big error. Userspace app developer will
>>>>> quickly see that something is wrong and looking at kernel log should
>>>>> explain why.
>>>> The problem is if someone calls mmap() and then decides to not access
>>>> the buffer before munmap() or GPU usage. How do we recognize that case
>>>> and separate it from a CPU access occured outside a sync? We could, as
>>>> mentioned above have a fault() handler in the generic kernel code and
>>>> make sure drivers don't populate PTEs until the first fault(). Another
>>>> option would be to scan all PTEs for an "accessed" flag, but I'm not
>>>> even sure all CPU architectures have such a flag?
>>>>
>>>> But there might be a simpler solution that I have overlooked?
>>> All arch have a dirty flag, so you could check that, as all we
>>> really care about is CPU write access. So all you need is clearing
>>> the dirty bit after each successfull GPU command stream ioctl
>>> and checking that no dirty bit is set in a region not cover by
>>> a flush(). Note that the clear and check can happen in the same
>>> function as part of buffer validation for the GPU command stream.
>> Actually, I do think we care about reading as well, since reading
>> without flushing anything written by the GPU will
>> yield garbage on a non-coherent architecture. Instead we might check for
>> the PAGE_ACCESSED bit.
> I do not think the read access after GPU matter. If people think it does
> then it is simple, at buffer validation in buffer mapping we invalidate
> CPU page table mapping and the prepare access ioctl populate them after
> checking that GPU is flush.
>
>> So the full version of this would keep track of all synced regions and
>> at buffer validation time, or unmap time error if there
>> is a page completely outside the union of all synced regions in any VMA
>> belonging to the dma-buf address space, then unmark all accessed PTEs
>> and invalidate TLBs accordingly, typically causing a global TLB flush.
>> Yeah, we could probably put together a helper function that does this,
>> but it will be expensive to run and the whole point of this API is to be
>> able to improve performance.
> No need for such complexity, the sync ioctl would go over the page table
> and clear dirty bit for all page in range that is synchronized. So once
> you get to the command ioctl you know that all dirty bit must be clear.
> Note this is only a page table walk in all case. I do not consider this
> to be that expensive.
>
>
The expensive part is the TLB flushing after the PTE update, which
typically needs to be performed on all cores. Although without a
benchmark I'm not sure how expensive. It might be that it doesn't
matter. After all, the vmwgfx- and I believe the qxl driver both use a
similar approach for fbdev user-space access, but that has never been
cosidered performance-critical...

/Thomas