[PATCH v2 0/3] drm: commit_work scheduling

[Daniel Vetter]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 11:16 PM Rob Clark <robdclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> From: Rob Clark <robdclark at chromium.org>
>
> The android userspace treats the display pipeline as a realtime problem.
> And arguably, if your goal is to not miss frame deadlines (ie. vblank),
> it is.  (See https://lwn.net/Articles/809545/ for the best explaination
> that I found.)
>
> But this presents a problem with using workqueues for non-blocking
> atomic commit_work(), because the SCHED_FIFO userspace thread(s) can
> preempt the worker.  Which is not really the outcome you want.. once
> the required fences are scheduled, you want to push the atomic commit
> down to hw ASAP.
>
> But the decision of whether commit_work should be RT or not really
> depends on what userspace is doing.  For a pure CFS userspace display
> pipeline, commit_work() should remain SCHED_NORMAL.
>
> To handle this, convert non-blocking commit_work() to use per-CRTC
> kthread workers, instead of system_unbound_wq.  Per-CRTC workers are
> used to avoid serializing commits when userspace is using a per-CRTC
> update loop.  And the last patch exposes the task id to userspace as
> a CRTC property, so that userspace can adjust the priority and sched
> policy to fit it's needs.
>
>
> v2: Drop client cap and in-kernel setting of priority/policy in
>     favor of exposing the kworker tid to userspace so that user-
>     space can set priority/policy.

Yeah I think this looks more reasonable. Still a bit irky interface,
so I'd like to get some kworker/rt ack on this. Other opens:
- needs userspace, the usual drill
- we need this also for vblank workers, otherwise this wont work for
drivers needing those because of another priority inversion.
- we probably want some indication of whether this actually does
something useful, not all drivers use atomic commit helpers. Not sure
how to do that.
- not sure whether the vfunc is an awesome idea, I'd frankly just
open-code this inline. We have similar special cases already for e.g.
dpms (and in multiple places), this isn't the worst.
- still feeling we could at least change the default to highpriority niceness.
- there's still the problem that commit works can overlap, and a
single worker can't do that anymore. So rolling that out for everyone
as-is feels a bit risky.

Cheers, Daniel

>
> Rob Clark (3):
>   drm/crtc: Introduce per-crtc kworker
>   drm/atomic: Use kthread worker for nonblocking commits
>   drm: Expose CRTC's kworker task id
>
>  drivers/gpu/drm/drm_atomic_helper.c | 13 ++++++++----
>  drivers/gpu/drm/drm_crtc.c          | 14 +++++++++++++
>  drivers/gpu/drm/drm_mode_config.c   | 14 +++++++++++++
>  drivers/gpu/drm/drm_mode_object.c   |  4 ++++
>  include/drm/drm_atomic.h            | 31 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  include/drm/drm_crtc.h              |  8 ++++++++
>  include/drm/drm_mode_config.h       |  9 +++++++++
>  include/drm/drm_property.h          |  9 +++++++++
>  8 files changed, 98 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
>
> --
> 2.26.2
>


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