[Nouveau] [PATCH 2/3] drm/nouveau: add lockless dynamic semaphore allocator

[Francisco Jerez]

Luca Barbieri <luca at luca-barbieri.com> writes:

>> How often do we expect cross-channel sync to kick in? Maybe 2-3 times
>> per frame? I suspect contentions will be rare enough to make spinlocks
>> as fast as atomics for all real-life cases, and they don't have such a
>> high maintainability cost. What do you guys think?
>
> For the case of a single (or a few) GL application the requirements
> are indeed modest.
>
> I'm not sure that spinlocks or an otherwise reduced solution would be
> much simpler.
> You basically would just avoid the retrying code.
>
> Also if you have a multithreaded/multiprocess GPGPU application on
> large SMP machine things may change, as you may have a lot of commands
> and semaphores in flight, as well as high contention for anything
> global.
>
Sounds like premature optimization to me. I'm just stating my personal
view here, but I have a feeling a patch with 60% of lines could do very
well the same for most realistic cases.

Maarten, Ben, what do you think about this?

> Of course, currently we hold both the BKL and struct_mutex around
> things, which makes it all moot, but hopefully we'll switch to
> per-channel mutexes soon (I'm looking into that).

BTW, the kernel has some linked list helpers you might want to use for
sem_bo_free_list, and probably the best place for the sem stuff to live
is "dev_priv->fence" instead of the root of drm_nouveau_private.
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