[Mesa-dev] [PATCH 0/5] Enable up to 24 MRF registers in gen6

[Mark Janes]

Hi Iago,

According to my tests, this patch series fixes the gles2/gles3
"functional.uniform_api.random.23" tests in dEQP, on sandybridge.

Do you see the same results?  Should this patch series be applied to the
stable branch?

thanks,

Mark

Iago Toral Quiroga <itoral at igalia.com> writes:

> There are some bug reports about shaders failing to compile in gen6
> because MRF 14 is used when we need to spill. For example:
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86469
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90631
>
> Discussion in bugzilla pointed to the fact that gen6 might actually have
> 24 MRF registers available instead of 16, so we could use other MRF
> registers and avoid these conflicts (we still need to investigate why
> some shaders need up to MRF 14 anyway, since this is not expected).
>
> Notice that the hardware docs are not clear about this fact:
>
> SNB PRM Vol4 Part2's "Table 5-4. MRF Registers Available in Device
> Hardware" says "Number per Thread" - "24 registers"
>
> However, SNB PRM Vol4 Part1, 1.6.1 Message Register File (MRF) says:
>
> "Normal threads should construct their messages in m1..m15. (...)
> Regardless of actual hardware implementation, the thread should
> not assume th at MRF addresses above m15 wrap to legal MRF registers."
>
> Therefore experimentation was necessary to evaluate if we had these extra
> MRF registers available or not. This was tested in gen6 using MRF
> registers 21..23 for spilling and doing a full piglit run (all.py) forcing
> spilling of everything on the FS backend. It was also tested by doing
> spilling of everything on both the FS and the VS backends with a piglit run
> of shader.py. In both cases no regressions were observed. In fact, many of
> these tests where helped in the cases where we forced spilling, since that
> triggered the same underlying problem described in the bug reports. Here are
> some results using INTEL_DEBUG=spill_fs,spill_vec4 for a shader.py run on
> gen6 hardware:
>
> Using MRFs 13..15 for spilling:
> crash: 2, fail: 113, pass: 6621, skip: 5461
>     
> Using MRFs 21..23 for spilling:
> crash: 2, fail: 12, pass: 6722, skip: 5461
>
> We might want to test this further with other instances of gen6 hardware
> though... I am not sure that we can safely conclude that all implementations
> of gen6 hardware have 24 MRF registers from my tests on just one particular
> SandyBridge laptop.
>
> Iago Toral Quiroga (5):
>   i965: Move MRF register asserts out of brw_reg.h
>   i965: Turn BRW_MAX_MRF into a macro that accepts a hardware generation
>   i965/fs: Use MRF registers 21-23 for spilling in gen6
>   i965/vec4: Use MRF registers 21-23 for spilling in gen6
>   i965: Maximum allowed size of SEND messages is 15 (4 bits)
>
>  src/mesa/drivers/dri/i965/brw_eu_emit.c            | 11 +++++----
>  src/mesa/drivers/dri/i965/brw_fs.cpp               |  4 ++--
>  src/mesa/drivers/dri/i965/brw_fs_generator.cpp     | 15 ++++++++----
>  src/mesa/drivers/dri/i965/brw_fs_reg_allocate.cpp  | 27 ++++++++++++----------
>  src/mesa/drivers/dri/i965/brw_inst.h               |  3 +++
>  src/mesa/drivers/dri/i965/brw_ir_vec4.h            |  2 +-
>  src/mesa/drivers/dri/i965/brw_reg.h                |  9 ++++----
>  .../drivers/dri/i965/brw_schedule_instructions.cpp |  4 ++--
>  src/mesa/drivers/dri/i965/brw_vec4_generator.cpp   | 10 +++++---
>  src/mesa/drivers/dri/i965/brw_vec4_visitor.cpp     | 15 +++++++-----
>  10 files changed, 61 insertions(+), 39 deletions(-)
>
> -- 
> 1.9.1
>
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