[Intel-xe] [PATCH v2 1/9] drm/sched: Convert drm scheduler to use a work queue rather than kthread

[Faith Ekstrand]

On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 4:51 AM Christian König <christian.koenig at amd.com>
wrote:

> Am 21.08.23 um 21:46 schrieb Faith Ekstrand:
>
> On Mon, Aug 21, 2023 at 1:13 PM Christian König <christian.koenig at amd.com>
> wrote:
>
>> [SNIP]
>> So as long as nobody from userspace comes and says we absolutely need to
>> optimize this use case I would rather not do it.
>>
>
> This is a place where nouveau's needs are legitimately different from AMD
> or Intel, I think.  NVIDIA's command streamer model is very different from
> AMD and Intel.  On AMD and Intel, each EXEC turns into a single small
> packet (on the order of 16B) which kicks off a command buffer.  There may
> be a bit of cache management or something around it but that's it.  From
> there, it's userspace's job to make one command buffer chain to another
> until it's finally done and then do a "return", whatever that looks like.
>
> NVIDIA's model is much more static.  Each packet in the HW/FW ring is an
> address and a size and that much data is processed and then it grabs the
> next packet and processes. The result is that, if we use multiple buffers
> of commands, there's no way to chain them together.  We just have to pass
> the whole list of buffers to the kernel.
>
>
> So far that is actually completely identical to what AMD has.
>
> A single EXEC ioctl / job may have 500 such addr+size packets depending on
> how big the command buffer is.
>
>
> And that is what I don't understand. Why would you need 100dreds of such
> addr+size packets?
>

Well, we're not really in control of it.  We can control our base pushbuf
size and that's something we can tune but we're still limited by the
client.  We have to submit another pushbuf whenever:

 1. We run out of space (power-of-two growth is also possible but the size
is limited to a maximum of about 4MiB due to hardware limitations.)
 2. The client calls a secondary command buffer.
 3. Any usage of indirect draw or dispatch on pre-Turing hardware.

At some point we need to tune our BO size a bit to avoid (1) while also
avoiding piles of tiny BOs.  However, (2) and (3) are out of our control.

This is basically identical to what AMD has (well on newer hw there is an
> extension in the CP packets to JUMP/CALL subsequent IBs, but this isn't
> widely used as far as I know).
>

According to Bas, RADV chains on recent hardware.


> Previously the limit was something like 4 which we extended to because Bas
> came up with similar requirements for the AMD side from RADV.
>
> But essentially those approaches with 100dreds of IBs doesn't sound like a
> good idea to me.
>

No one's arguing that they like it.  Again, the hardware isn't designed to
have a kernel in the way. It's designed to be fed by userspace. But we're
going to have the kernel in the middle for a while so we need to make it
not suck too bad.

~Faith

It gets worse on pre-Turing hardware where we have to split the batch for
> every single DrawIndirect or DispatchIndirect.
>
> Lest you think NVIDIA is just crazy here, it's a perfectly reasonable
> model if you assume that userspace is feeding the firmware.  When that's
> happening, you just have a userspace thread that sits there and feeds the
> ringbuffer with whatever is next and you can marshal as much data through
> as you want. Sure, it'd be nice to have a 2nd level batch thing that gets
> launched from the FW ring and has all the individual launch commands but
> it's not at all necessary.
>
> What does that mean from a gpu_scheduler PoV? Basically, it means a
> variable packet size.
>
> What does this mean for implementation? IDK.  One option would be to teach
> the scheduler about actual job sizes. Another would be to virtualize it and
> have another layer underneath the scheduler that does the actual feeding of
> the ring. Another would be to decrease the job size somewhat and then have
> the front-end submit as many jobs as it needs to service userspace and only
> put the out-fences on the last job. All the options kinda suck.
>
>
> Yeah, agree. The job size Danilo suggested is still the least painful.
>
> Christian.
>
>
> ~Faith
>
>
>
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