drm/i915: Record the tail at each request and use it to estimate the head
By recording the location of every request in the ringbuffer, we know
that in order to retire the request the GPU must have finished reading
it and so the GPU head is now beyond the tail of the request. We can
therefore provide a conservative estimate of where the GPU is reading
from in order to avoid having to read back the ring buffer registers
when polling for space upon starting a new write into the ringbuffer.
A secondary effect is that this allows us to convert
intel_ring_buffer_wait() to use i915_wait_request() and so consolidate
upon the single function to handle the complicated task of waiting upon
the GPU. A necessary precaution is that we need to make that wait
uninterruptible to match the existing conditions as all the callers of
intel_ring_begin() have not been audited to handle ERESTARTSYS
correctly.
By using a conservative estimate for the head, and always processing all
outstanding requests first, we prevent a race condition between using
the estimate and direct reads of I915_RING_HEAD which could result in
the value of the head going backwards, and the tail overflowing once
again. We are also careful to mark any request that we skip over in
order to free space in ring as consumed which provides a
self-consistency check.
Given sufficient abuse, such as a set of unthrottled GPU bound
cairo-traces, avoiding the use of I915_RING_HEAD gives a 10-20% boost on
Sandy Bridge (i5-2520m):
firefox-paintball 18927ms -> 15646ms: 1.21x speedup
firefox-fishtank 12563ms -> 11278ms: 1.11x speedup
which is a mild consolation for the performance those traces achieved from
exploiting the buggy autoreported head.
v2: Add a few more comments and make request->tail a conservative
estimate as suggested by Daniel Vetter.
Signed-off-by: Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>
[danvet: resolve conflicts with retirement defering and the lack of
the autoreport head removal (that will go in through -fixes).]
Signed-off-by: Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch>
4 files changed