[Mesa-dev] [RFC] Linux Graphics Next: Explicit fences everywhere and no BO fences - initial proposal

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On Mon, 19 Apr 2021 at 11:48, Marek Olšák <maraeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Deadlock mitigation to recover from segfaults:
> - The kernel knows which process is obliged to signal which fence. This
> information is part of the Present request and supplied by userspace.
> - If the producer crashes, the kernel signals the submit fence, so that
> the consumer can make forward progress.
> - If the consumer crashes, the kernel signals the return fence, so that
> the producer can reclaim the buffer.
> - A GPU hang signals all fences. Other deadlocks will be handled like GPU
> hangs.
>

Another thought: with completely arbitrary userspace fencing, none of this
is helpful either. If the compositor can't guarantee that a hostile client
has submitted a fence which will never be signaled, then it won't be
waiting on it, so it already needs infrastructure to handle something like
this. That already handles the crashed-client case, because if the client
crashes, then its connection will be dropped, which will trigger the
compositor to destroy all its resources anyway, including any pending waits.

GPU hangs also look pretty similar; it's an infinite wait, until the client
resubmits a new buffer which would replace (& discard) the old.

So signal-fence-on-process-exit isn't helpful and doesn't provide any extra
reliability; it in fact probably just complicates things.

Cheers,
Daniel
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/attachments/20210420/92aaa3a4/attachment-0001.htm>