[PATCH v3 0/8] drm: Introduce sparse GEM shmem

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On Mon, 14 Apr 2025 at 16:34, Steven Price <steven.price at arm.com> wrote:
> On 14/04/2025 13:47, Boris Brezillon wrote:
> > Hm, I might have been too prompt at claiming this was doable. In
> > practice, doing that might regress Lima and Panfrost in situations
> > where trying harder than GFP_NOWAIT would free up some memory. Not
> > saying this was right to use GFP_KERNEL in the first place, but some
> > expectations were set by this original mistake, so I'll probably need
> > Lima developers to vouch in for this change after they've done some
> > testing on a system under high memory pressure, and I'd need to do the
> > same kind of testing for Panfrost and ask Steve if he's okay with that
> > too.
>
> It's a tricky one. The ideal would be to teach user space how to recover
> from the memory allocation failure (even on older GPUs it's still in
> theory possible to break up the work and do incremental rendering). But
> that ship sailed long ago so this would be a regression.

Yeah. Vulkan clients are a little better in this regard, but GL
clients are pretty useless at dealing with device loss across the
board.

Cheers,
Daniel