[PATCH drm-misc-next 1/3] drm/sched: implement dynamic job flow control

[Danilo Krummrich]

On 9/27/23 09:25, Boris Brezillon wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Sep 2023 02:13:59 +0200
> Danilo Krummrich <dakr at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 9/26/23 22:43, Luben Tuikov wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> On 2023-09-24 18:43, Danilo Krummrich wrote:
>>>> Currently, job flow control is implemented simply by limiting the amount
>>>> of jobs in flight. Therefore, a scheduler is initialized with a
>>>> submission limit that corresponds to a certain amount of jobs.
>>>
>>> "certain"? How about this instead:
>>> " ... that corresponds to the number of jobs which can be sent
>>>     to the hardware."?
>>>    
>>>>
>>>> This implies that for each job drivers need to account for the maximum
>>>                                   ^,
>>> Please add a comma after "job".
>>>    
>>>> job size possible in order to not overflow the ring buffer.
>>>
>>> Well, different hardware designs would implement this differently.
>>> Ideally, you only want pointers into the ring buffer, and then
>>> the hardware consumes as much as it can. But this is a moot point
>>> and it's always a good idea to have a "job size" hint from the client.
>>> So this is a good patch.
>>>
>>> Ideally, you want to say that the hardware needs to be able to
>>> accommodate the number of jobs which can fit in the hardware
>>> queue times the largest job. This is a waste of resources
>>> however, and it is better to give a hint as to the size of a job,
>>> by the client. If the hardware can peek and understand dependencies,
>>> on top of knowing the "size of the job", it can be an extremely
>>> efficient scheduler.
>>>    
>>>>
>>>> However, there are drivers, such as Nouveau, where the job size has a
>>>> rather large range. For such drivers it can easily happen that job
>>>> submissions not even filling the ring by 1% can block subsequent
>>>> submissions, which, in the worst case, can lead to the ring run dry.
>>>>
>>>> In order to overcome this issue, allow for tracking the actual job size
>>>> instead of the amount job jobs. Therefore, add a field to track a job's
>>>
>>> "the amount job jobs." --> "the number of jobs."
>>
>> Yeah, I somehow manage to always get this wrong, which I guess you noticed
>> below already.
>>
>> That's all good points below - gonna address them.
>>
>> Did you see Boris' response regarding a separate callback in order to fetch
>> the job's submission units dynamically? Since this is needed by PowerVR, I'd
>> like to include this in V2. What's your take on that?
>>
>> My only concern with that would be that if I got what Boris was saying
>> correctly calling
>>
>> WARN_ON(s_job->submission_units > sched->submission_limit);
>>
>> from drm_sched_can_queue() wouldn't work anymore, since this could indeed happen
>> temporarily. I think this was also Christian's concern.
> 
> Actually, I think that's fine to account for the max job size in the
> first check, we're unlikely to have so many native fence waits that our
> job can't fit in an empty ring buffer.
> 

But it can happen, right? Hence, we can't have this check, do we?