[Intel-gfx] [PATCH v2] drm/i915: Introduce an internal allocator for disposable private objects

[Joonas Lahtinen]

On la, 2016-10-08 at 09:34 +0100, Chris Wilson wrote:
> Quite a few of our objects used for internal hardware programming do not
> benefit from being swappable or from being zero initialised. As such
> they do not benefit from using a shmemfs backing storage and since they
> are internal and never directly exposed to the user, we do not need to
> worry about providing a filp. For these we can use an
> drm_i915_gem_object wrapper around a sg_table of plain struct page. They
> are not swap backed and not automatically pinned. If they are reaped
> by the shrinker, the pages are released and the contents discarded. For
> the internal use case, this is fine as for example, ringbuffers are
> pinned from being written by a request to be read by the hardware. Once
> they are idle, they can be discarded entirely. As such they are a good
> match for execlist ringbuffers and a small variety of other internal
> objects.
> 
> In the first iteration, this is limited to the scratch batch buffers we
> use (for command parsing and state initialisation).
> 
> v2: Allocate physically contiguous pages, where possible.

Does not hurt, but what does it gain us, exactly?

> 
> Signed-off-by: Chris Wilson <chris at chris-wilson.co.uk>
> Cc: Tvrtko Ursulin <tvrtko.ursulin at linux.intel.com>

Reviewed-by: Joonas Lahtinen <joonas.lahtinen at linux.intel.com>

Regards, Joonas
-- 
Joonas Lahtinen
Open Source Technology Center
Intel Corporation