[PATCH drm-next v5 00/14] [RFC] DRM GPUVA Manager & Nouveau VM_BIND UAPI

Thu Jun 22 13:58:23 UTC 2023

Hi Boris,

On 6/22/23 15:01, Boris Brezillon wrote:
> Hi Danilo,
> 
> On Tue, 20 Jun 2023 14:46:07 +0200
> Danilo Krummrich <dakr at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
>>> The only thing I'm worried about is the 'sync mapping requests have to
>>> go through the async path and wait for all previous async requests to
>>> be processed' problem I mentioned in one of your previous submission,
>>> but I'm happy leave that for later.
>>
>> Yes, I'm aware of this limitation.
>>
>> Let me quickly try to explain where this limitation comes from and how I
>> intend to address it.
>>
>> In order to be able to allocate the required page tables for a mapping
>> request and in order to free corresponding page tables once the (async)
>> job finished I need to know the corresponding sequence of operations
>> (drm_gpuva_ops) to fulfill the mapping request.
>>
>> This requires me to update the GPUVA space in the ioctl() rather than in
>> the async stage, because otherwise I would need to wait for previous
>> jobs to finish before being able to submit subsequent jobs to the job
>> queue, since I need an up to date view of the GPUVA space in order to
>> calculate the sequence of operations to fulfill a mapping request.
>>
>> As a consequence all jobs need to be processed in the order they were
>> submitted, including synchronous jobs.
>>
>> @Matt: I think you will have the same limitation with synchronous jobs
>> as your implementation in XE should be similar?
>>
>> In order to address it I want to switch to using callbacks rather than
>> 'pre-allocated' drm_gpuva_ops and update the GPUVA space within the
>> asynchronous stage.
>> This would allow me to 'fit' synchronous jobs
>> between jobs waiting in the async job queue. However, to do this I have
>> to re-work how the page table handling in Nouveau is implemented, since
>> this would require me to be able to manage the page tables without
>> knowing the exact sequence of operations to fulfill a mapping request.
> 
> Ok, so I think that's more or less what we're trying to do right
> now in PowerVR.
> 
> - First, we make sure we reserve enough MMU page tables for a given map
>    operation to succeed no matter the VM state in the VM_BIND job
>    submission path (our VM_BIND ioctl). That means we're always
>    over-provisioning and returning unused memory back when the operation
>    is done if we end up using less memory.
> - We pre-allocate for the mapple-tree insertions.
> - Then we map using drm_gpuva_sm_map() and the callbacks we provided in
>    the drm_sched::run_job() path. We guarantee that no memory is
>    allocated in that path thanks to the pre-allocation/reservation we've
>    done at VM_BIND job submission time.
> 
> The problem I see with this v5 is that:
> 
> 1/ We now have a dma_resv_lock_held() in drm_gpuva_{link,unlink}(),
>     which, in our case, is called in the async drm_sched::run_job() path,
>     and we don't hold the lock in that path (it's been released just
>     after the job submission).

My solution to this, as by now, is to - in the same way we pre-allocate 
- to just pre-link and pre-unlink. And then fix things up in the cleanup 
path.

However, depending on the driver, this might require you to set a flag 
in the driver specific structure (embedding struct drm_gpuva) whether 
the gpuva is actually mapped (as in has active page table entries). 
Maybe we could also just add such a flag to struct drm_gpuva. But yeah, 
doesn't sound too nice to be honest...

> 2/ I'm worried that Liam's plan to only reserve what's actually needed
>     based on the mapple tree state is going to play against us, because
>     the mapple-tree is only modified at job exec time, and we might have
>     several unmaps happening between the moment we created and queued the
>     jobs, and the moment they actually get executed, meaning the
>     mapple-tree reservation might no longer fit the bill.

Yes, I'm aware and I explained to Liam in detail why we need the 
mas_preallocate_worst_case() way of doing it.

See this mail: 
https://lore.kernel.org/nouveau/68cd25de-e767-725e-2e7b-703217230bb0@redhat.com/T/#ma326e200b1de1e3c9df4e9fcb3bf243061fee8b5

He hasn't answered yet, but I hope we can just get (or actually keep) 
such a function (hopefully with better naming), since it shouldn't 
interfere with anything else.

> 
> For issue #1, it shouldn't be to problematic if we use a regular lock to
> insert to/remove from the GEM gpuva list.

Yes, that's why I had a separate GEM gpuva list lock in the first place. 
However, this doesn't really work when generating ops rather than using 
the callback interface.

Have a look at drm_gpuva_gem_unmap_ops_create() requested by Matt for 
XE. This function generates drm_gpuva_ops to unmap all mappings of a 
given GEM. In order to do that the function must iterate the GEM's gpuva 
list and allocate operations for each mapping. As a consequence the 
gpuva list lock wouldn't be allowed to be taken in the fence signalling 
path (run_job()) any longer. Hence, we can just protect the list with 
the GEM's dma-resv lock.

However, I can understand that it might be inconvenient for the callback 
interface and admittedly my solution to that isn't that nice as well. 
Hence the following idea:

For drivers to be able to use their own lock for that it would be enough 
to get rid of the lockdep checks. We could just add a flag to the GPUVA 
manager to let the driver indicate it wants to do it's own locking for 
the GPUVA list and skip the lockdep checks for the dma-resv lock in that 
case.

> 
> For issue #2, I can see a way out if, instead of freeing gpuva nodes,
> we flag those as unused when we see that something happening later in
> the queue is going to map a section being unmapped. All of this implies
> keeping access to already queued VM_BIND jobs (using the spsc queue at
> the entity level is not practical), and iterating over them every time
> a new sync or async job is queued to flag what needs to be retained. It
> would obviously be easier if we could tell the mapple-tree API
> 'provision as if the tree was empty', so all we have to do is just
> over-provision for both the page tables and mapple-tree insertion, and
> free the unused mem when the operation is done.
> 
> Don't know if you already thought about that and/or have solutions to
> solve these issues.

As already mentioned above, I'd just expect we can keep it the 
over-provision way, as you say. I think it's a legit use case to not 
know the state of the maple tree at the time the pre-allocated nodes 
will be used and keeping that should not interfere with Liams plan to 
(hopefully separately) optimize for the pre-allocation use case they 
have within -mm.

But let's wait for his take on that.

- Danilo

> 
> Regards,
> 
> Boris
> 