[PATCH 5/6] drm: Prevent vblank counter jumps with timestamp based update method.

Tue Feb 9 15:03:47 UTC 2016

On Tue, Feb 09, 2016 at 04:11:49PM +0200, Ville Syrjälä wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 09, 2016 at 02:53:30PM +0100, Mario Kleiner wrote:
> > On 02/09/2016 11:09 AM, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> > > On Mon, Feb 08, 2016 at 02:13:28AM +0100, Mario Kleiner wrote:
> > >> The changes to drm_update_vblank_count() in Linux 4.4 added a
> > >> method to emulate a hardware vblank counter by use of high
> > >> precision vblank timestamps if a kms driver supports those,
> > >> but doesn't suppport hw vblank counters.
> > >>
> > >> That method assumes that the old timestamp from a previous
> > >> invocation is valid, but that is not always the case. E.g.,
> > >> if drm_reset_vblank_timestamp() gets called during drm_vblank_on()
> > >> or drm_update_vblank_count() gets called outside vblank irq and
> > >> the high precision timestamping can't deliver a precise timestamp,
> > >> ie. drm_get_last_vbltimestamp() delivers a return value of false,
> > >> then those functions will initialize the old timestamp to zero
> > >> to mark it as invalid.
> > >>
> > >> A following call to drm_update_vblank_count() would then calculate
> > >> elapsed time with vblank irqs off as current vblank timestamp minus
> > >> the zero old timestamp and compute a software vblank counter increment
> > >> that corresponds to system uptime, causing a large forward jump of the
> > >> software vblank counter. That jump in turn can cause too long waits
> > >> in drmWaitVblank and very long delays in delivery of vblank events,
> > >> resulting in hangs of userspace clients.
> > >>
> > >> This problem can be observed on nouveau-kms during machine
> > >> suspend->resume cycles, where drm_vblank_off is called during
> > >> suspend, drm_vblank_on is called during resume and the first
> > >> queries to drm_get_last_vbltimestamp() don't deliver high
> > >> precision timestamps, resulting in a large harmful counter jump.
> > >
> > > Why does nouveau enable vblank interrupts before it can get valid
> > > timestamps? That sounds like the core bug here, and papering over that in
> > > the vblank code feels very wrong to me. Maybe we should instead just not
> > > sample the vblank at all if the timestamp fails and splat a big WARN_ON
> > > about this, to give driver writers a chance to fix up their mess?
> > > -Daniel
> > >
> > 
> > The high precision timestamping is allowed to fail for a kms driver 
> > under some conditions which are not implementation errors of the driver, 
> > or getting disabled by user override, so we should handle that robustly. 
> > We handle it robustly everywhere else in the drm, so we should do it 
> > here as well.
> > 
> > E.g., nouveau generally supports timestamping/scanout position queries, 
> > but can't support it on old pre NV-50 hardware with some output type 
> > (either on analog VGA, or DVI-D, can't remember atm. which one is 
> > unsupported).
> 
> I think the surprising thing here is that it fails first and then
> succeeds on the same crtc/output combo presumably.

Yeah exactly this. Failing consistently is ok imo (and probably should be
handled). Failing first and then later on working (without changing the
mode config in between) seems suspicous. That shouldn't ever happen really
and seems like a driver bug (like enabling vblanks too early, before the
pipe is fully up&running).
-Daniel

> 
> I guess in theory the driver could fail during random times for whatever
> reason, though I tend to think that the driver should either make it
> robust or not even pretend to support it.
> 
> I suppose one failure mode the driver can't really do anything about is
> some random SMI crap or something stalling the timestamp queries enough
> that we fail the precisions tests and exhaust the retry limits. So yeah,
> making it robust against that kind of nastyness sounds line it might be
> a good idea. Though perhaps it should be something a bit more severe
> than a DRM_DEBUG since I think it really shouldn't happen when the
> driver and system are otherwise sane. Of course if it routinely fails
> with some driver then simply making it spew errors into dmesg isn't
> so nice, unless the driver also gets fixed.
> 
> > 
> > There are also new Soc drivers showing up which support those methods, 
> > but at least i didn't verify or test if their implementations are good 
> > enough for the needs of the new drm_udpate_vblank_count() which is more 
> > sensitive to kms drivers being even slightly off.
> > 
> > -mario
> > 
> > >>
> > >> Fix this by checking if the old timestamp used for this calculations
> > >> is zero == invalid. If so, perform a counter increment of +1 to
> > >> prevent large counter jumps and reinitialize the timestamps to
> > >> sane values.
> > >>
> > >> Signed-off-by: Mario Kleiner <mario.kleiner.de at gmail.com>
> > >> Cc: <stable at vger.kernel.org> # 4.4+
> > >> Cc: michel at daenzer.net
> > >> Cc: vbabka at suse.cz
> > >> Cc: ville.syrjala at linux.intel.com
> > >> Cc: daniel.vetter at ffwll.ch
> > >> Cc: dri-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
> > >> Cc: alexander.deucher at amd.com
> > >> Cc: christian.koenig at amd.com
> > >> ---
> > >>   drivers/gpu/drm/drm_irq.c | 7 +++++++
> > >>   1 file changed, 7 insertions(+)
> > >>
> > >> diff --git a/drivers/gpu/drm/drm_irq.c b/drivers/gpu/drm/drm_irq.c
> > >> index fb17c45..88bdf19 100644
> > >> --- a/drivers/gpu/drm/drm_irq.c
> > >> +++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/drm_irq.c
> > >> @@ -216,6 +216,13 @@ static void drm_update_vblank_count(struct drm_device *dev, unsigned int pipe,
> > >>   			DRM_DEBUG_VBL("crtc %u: Redundant vblirq ignored."
> > >>   				      " diff_ns = %lld, framedur_ns = %d)\n",
> > >>   				      pipe, (long long) diff_ns, framedur_ns);
> > >> +
> > >> +		/* No valid t_old to calculate diff? Bump +1 to force reinit. */
> > >> +		if (t_old->tv_sec == 0 && t_old->tv_usec == 0) {
> > >> +			DRM_DEBUG_VBL("crtc %u: No baseline ts. Bump +1.\n",
> > >> +				      pipe);
> > >> +			diff = 1;
> > >> +		}
> > >>   	} else {
> > >>   		/* some kind of default for drivers w/o accurate vbl timestamping */
> > >>   		diff = (flags & DRM_CALLED_FROM_VBLIRQ) != 0;
> > >> --
> > >> 1.9.1
> > >>
> > >
> 
> -- 
> Ville Syrjälä
> Intel OTC

-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
http://blog.ffwll.ch