[Intel-gfx] [PATCH 04/11] drm/i915: Make request allocation caches global

[Tvrtko Ursulin]

On 27/02/2019 10:44, Chris Wilson wrote:
> Quoting Tvrtko Ursulin (2019-02-27 10:29:43)
>>
>> On 26/02/2019 10:23, Chris Wilson wrote:
>>> As kmem_caches share the same properties (size, allocation/free behaviour)
>>> for all potential devices, we can use global caches. While this
>>> potential has worse fragmentation behaviour (one can argue that
>>> different devices would have different activity lifetimes, but you can
>>> also argue that activity is temporal across the system) it is the
>>> default behaviour of the system at large to amalgamate matching caches.
>>>
>>> The benefit for us is much reduced pointer dancing along the frequent
>>> allocation paths.
>>>
>>> v2: Defer shrinking until after a global grace period for futureproofing
>>> multiple consumers of the slab caches, similar to the current strategy
>>> for avoiding shrinking too early.
>>
>> I suggested to call i915_globals_park directly from __i915_gem_park for
>> symmetry with how i915_gem_unpark calls i915_globals_unpark.
>> i915_globals has it's own delayed setup so I don't think it benefits
>> from the double indirection courtesy of being called from shrink_caches.
> 
> I replied I left that change until a later patch after the final
> conversions. Mostly so that we had a standalone patch to revert if the
> rcu_work turns out badly. In this patch, it was to be the simple
> translation over to global_shrink, except you asked for it to be truly
> global and so we needed another layer of counters.

It's a hard sell I think. Because why even have rcu work now in this 
case? You could make i915_globals_park just shrink if active counter 
dropped to zero. I don't see a benefit in a temporary asymmetric solution.

Regards,

Tvrtko