[Intel-gfx] [PATCH 4/6] drm/i915: Set our shrinker->batch to 4096 (~16MiB)

[Joonas Lahtinen]

On Wed, 2017-08-16 at 14:55 +0100, Chris Wilson wrote:
> Quoting Joonas Lahtinen (2017-08-16 14:39:00)
> > On Sat, 2017-08-12 at 12:51 +0100, Chris Wilson wrote:
> > > Prefer to defer activating our GEM shrinker until we have a few
> > > megabytes to free; or we have accumulated sufficient mempressure by
> > > deferring the reclaim to force a shrink. The intent is that because our
> > > objects may typically be large, we are too effective at shrinking and
> > > are not rewarded for freeing more pages than the batch. It will also
> > > defer the initial shrinking to hopefully put it at a lower priority than
> > > say the buffer cache (although it will balance out over a number of
> > > reclaims, with GEM being more bursty).
> > > 
> > > Signed-off-by: Chris Wilson <chris at chris-wilson.co.uk>
> > > ---
> > >  drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem_shrinker.c | 1 +
> > >  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
> > > 
> > > diff --git a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem_shrinker.c b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem_shrinker.c
> > > index 5b8bc0e4f336..8bb17e9a52de 100644
> > > --- a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem_shrinker.c
> > > +++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem_shrinker.c
> > > @@ -461,6 +461,7 @@ void i915_gem_shrinker_init(struct drm_i915_private *dev_priv)
> > >       dev_priv->mm.shrinker.scan_objects = i915_gem_shrinker_scan;
> > >       dev_priv->mm.shrinker.count_objects = i915_gem_shrinker_count;
> > >       dev_priv->mm.shrinker.seeks = DEFAULT_SEEKS;
> > > +     dev_priv->mm.shrinker.batch = 4096;
> > 
> > Did you try how this alone effects the runtime of two consequtive
> > gem.testlist runs? Is there some specific test/usecase that benefits
> > from this. We'd be the first one to set this, md/raid5.c sets it to 128
> > which is the default (0).
> 
> My testing was trying to play a game that was hitting swap on an old
> hdd. So not very quantifiable, and vmscan is very unintuitive. 
> 
> Note also that we are special in that we don't report objects but pages.
> Not that it makes any difference, upon reclaim every slab is basically
> asked to give up some %% of what it reports, with some hysteresis thrown
> in on top.
> 
> The only way we can do anything here is to throw it at lots of systems
> and see how that helps. My gut feeling says that the batch size should
> be approximately the typical object size in the freeable list, to try to
> reduce the amount of inefficient work. Now, the value is read before
> scan->count is called, but we can always improve the estimate for the
> next pass.

For documentation purposes, from IRC, this is;

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

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