[Intel-gfx] [PATCH 02/21] drm/i915/gtt: Workaround for HW preload not flushing pdps

[Dave Gordon]

On 13/08/15 11:12, Michel Thierry wrote:
> On 8/13/2015 5:08 PM, Zhiyuan Lv wrote:
>> Hi Michel,
>>
>> Thanks for the reply!
>>
>> I yet have another question: right now the mark_tlb_dirty() will be
>> called if any level of PPGTT table is changed. But for the EXECLIST
>> context submission, we only need LRI commands if there are L3 PDP root
>> pointer changes right? Thanks!
>
> mark_tlbs_dirty is not only for execlists mode, we re-used it since it
> was already there.
>
> The update is only required when a PDP is allocated.
>
> -Michel

Doesn't that depend on whether the context is running? The LRI reload 
has the side effect of flushing all current knowledge of mappings, so 
every level of PD gets refreshed from memory.

If we're not updating the top level PDPs, and we know the context isn't 
active, then we *assume* that lower-level PDs will be refreshed when the 
context is next loaded. (This hasn't been true on all hardware, some of 
which cached previously-retrieved PDs across ctx save-and-reload, and 
that's one reason why there's a "Force PD Restore" bit, but we've been 
told not to use it on current h/w). AFAICT, current chips don't cache 
previous PDs and don't need the "Force" bit for this case.

OTOH, if we don't know whether the context is running, then we can't be 
sure when (or whether) any PD updates will be seen. As long as the 
changes of interest are only ever *from* NULL *to* non-NULL, we *expect* 
it to work, because (we *assume*) the GPU won't cache negative results 
from PD lookups; so any lookup that previously hit an invalid mapping 
will be re-fetched next time it's required (and may now be good).

If we don't reload the PDPs with LRIs, then perhaps to be safe we need 
to inject some other instruction that will just force a re-fetch of the 
lower-level PDs from memory, without altering any top-level PDPs? In 
conjunction with preallocating the top-level entries, that ought to 
guarantee that the updates would be seen just before the point where 
they're about to be used?

.Dave.