[PATCH drm-next 00/14] [RFC] DRM GPUVA Manager & Nouveau VM_BIND UAPI

[Christian König]

Am 18.01.23 um 20:17 schrieb Dave Airlie:
> On Thu, 19 Jan 2023 at 02:54, Alex Deucher <alexdeucher at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 11:50 AM Danilo Krummrich <dakr at redhat.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On 1/18/23 17:30, Alex Deucher wrote:
>>>> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 11:19 AM Danilo Krummrich <dakr at redhat.com> wrote:
>>>>> On 1/18/23 16:37, Christian König wrote:
>>>>>> Am 18.01.23 um 16:34 schrieb Danilo Krummrich:
>>>>>>> Hi Christian,
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On 1/18/23 09:53, Christian König wrote:
>>>>>>>> Am 18.01.23 um 07:12 schrieb Danilo Krummrich:
>>>>>>>>> This patch series provides a new UAPI for the Nouveau driver in
>>>>>>>>> order to
>>>>>>>>> support Vulkan features, such as sparse bindings and sparse residency.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Furthermore, with the DRM GPUVA manager it provides a new DRM core
>>>>>>>>> feature to
>>>>>>>>> keep track of GPU virtual address (VA) mappings in a more generic way.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> The DRM GPUVA manager is indented to help drivers implement
>>>>>>>>> userspace-manageable
>>>>>>>>> GPU VA spaces in reference to the Vulkan API. In order to achieve
>>>>>>>>> this goal it
>>>>>>>>> serves the following purposes in this context.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>        1) Provide a dedicated range allocator to track GPU VA
>>>>>>>>> allocations and
>>>>>>>>>           mappings, making use of the drm_mm range allocator.
>>>>>>>> This means that the ranges are allocated by the kernel? If yes that's
>>>>>>>> a really really bad idea.
>>>>>>> No, it's just for keeping track of the ranges userspace has allocated.
>>>>>> Ok, that makes more sense.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> So basically you have an IOCTL which asks kernel for a free range? Or
>>>>>> what exactly is the drm_mm used for here?
>>>>> Not even that, userspace provides both the base address and the range,
>>>>> the kernel really just keeps track of things. Though, writing a UAPI on
>>>>> top of the GPUVA manager asking for a free range instead would be
>>>>> possible by just adding the corresponding wrapper functions to get a
>>>>> free hole.
>>>>>
>>>>> Currently, and that's what I think I read out of your question, the main
>>>>> benefit of using drm_mm over simply stuffing the entries into a list or
>>>>> something boils down to easier collision detection and iterating
>>>>> sub-ranges of the whole VA space.
>>>> Why not just do this in userspace?  We have a range manager in
>>>> libdrm_amdgpu that you could lift out into libdrm or some other
>>>> helper.
>>> The kernel still needs to keep track of the mappings within the various
>>> VA spaces, e.g. it silently needs to unmap mappings that are backed by
>>> BOs that get evicted and remap them once they're validated (or swapped
>>> back in).
>> Ok, you are just using this for maintaining the GPU VM space in the kernel.
>>
> Yes the idea behind having common code wrapping drm_mm for this is to
> allow us to make the rules consistent across drivers.
>
> Userspace (generally Vulkan, some compute) has interfaces that pretty
> much dictate a lot of how VMA tracking works, esp around lifetimes,
> sparse mappings and splitting/merging underlying page tables, I'd
> really like this to be more consistent across drivers, because already
> I think we've seen with freedreno some divergence from amdgpu and we
> also have i915/xe to deal with. I'd like to at least have one place
> that we can say this is how it should work, since this is something
> that *should* be consistent across drivers mostly, as it is more about
> how the uapi is exposed.

That's a really good idea, but the implementation with drm_mm won't work 
like that.

We have Vulkan applications which use the sparse feature to create 
literally millions of mappings. That's why I have fine tuned the mapping 
structure in amdgpu down to ~80 bytes IIRC and save every CPU cycle 
possible in the handling of that.

A drm_mm_node is more in the range of ~200 bytes and certainly not 
suitable for this kind of job.

I strongly suggest to rather use a good bunch of the amdgpu VM code as 
blueprint for the common infrastructure.

Regards,
Christian.

>
> Dave.