drm/i915/execlists: Direct submission of new requests (avoid tasklet/ksoftirqd)
authorChris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>
Thu, 28 Jun 2018 20:12:11 +0000 (21:12 +0100)
committerChris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>
Thu, 28 Jun 2018 21:55:10 +0000 (22:55 +0100)
commit9512f985c32d45ab439a210981e0d73071da395a
tree2688861268872c93c691f74282b854b666c1496d
parentfd8526e509020ed30298ab57d03edc97bef83962
drm/i915/execlists: Direct submission of new requests (avoid tasklet/ksoftirqd)

Back in commit 27af5eea54d1 ("drm/i915: Move execlists irq handler to a
bottom half"), we came to the conclusion that running our CSB processing
and ELSP submission from inside the irq handler was a bad idea. A really
bad idea as we could impose nearly 1s latency on other users of the
system, on average! Deferring our work to a tasklet allowed us to do the
processing with irqs enabled, reducing the impact to an average of about
50us.

We have since eradicated the use of forcewaked mmio from inside the CSB
processing and ELSP submission, bringing the impact down to around 5us
(on Kabylake); an order of magnitude better than our measurements 2
years ago on Broadwell and only about 2x worse on average than the
gem_syslatency on an unladen system.

In this iteration of the tasklet-vs-direct submission debate, we seek a
compromise where by we submit new requests immediately to the HW but
defer processing the CS interrupt onto a tasklet. We gain the advantage
of low-latency and ksoftirqd avoidance when waking up the HW, while
avoiding the system-wide starvation of our CS irq-storms.

Comparing the impact on the maximum latency observed (that is the time
stolen from an RT process) over a 120s interval, repeated several times
(using gem_syslatency, similar to RT's cyclictest) while the system is
fully laden with i915 nops, we see that direct submission an actually
improve the worse case.

Maximum latency in microseconds of a third party RT thread
(gem_syslatency -t 120 -f 2)
  x Always using tasklets (a couple of >1000us outliers removed)
  + Only using tasklets from CS irq, direct submission of requests
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|          +                                                             |
|          +                                                             |
|          +                                                             |
|          +       +                                                     |
|          + +     +                                                     |
|       +  + +     +  x     x     x                                      |
|      +++ + +     +  x  x  x  x  x  x                                   |
|      +++ + ++  + +  *x x  x  x  x  x                                   |
|      +++ + ++  + *  *x x  *  x  x  x                                   |
|    + +++ + ++  * * +*xxx  *  x  x  xx                                  |
|    * +++ + ++++* *x+**xx+ *  x  x xxxx x                               |
|   **x++++*++**+*x*x****x+ * +x xx xxxx x          x                    |
|x* ******+***************++*+***xxxxxx* xx*x     xxx +                x+|
|             |__________MA___________|                                  |
|      |______M__A________|                                              |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
    N           Min           Max        Median           Avg        Stddev
x 118            91           186           124     125.28814     16.279137
+ 120            92           187           109     112.00833     13.458617
Difference at 95.0% confidence
-13.2798 +/- 3.79219
-10.5994% +/- 3.02677%
(Student's t, pooled s = 14.9237)

However the mean latency is adversely affected:

Mean latency in microseconds of a third party RT thread
(gem_syslatency -t 120 -f 1)
  x Always using tasklets
  + Only using tasklets from CS irq, direct submission of requests
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|           xxxxxx                                        +   ++         |
|           xxxxxx                                        +   ++         |
|           xxxxxx                                      + +++ ++         |
|           xxxxxxx                                     +++++ ++         |
|           xxxxxxx                                     +++++ ++         |
|           xxxxxxx                                     +++++ +++        |
|           xxxxxxx                                   + ++++++++++       |
|           xxxxxxxx                                 ++ ++++++++++       |
|           xxxxxxxx                                 ++ ++++++++++       |
|          xxxxxxxxxx                                +++++++++++++++     |
|         xxxxxxxxxxx    x                           +++++++++++++++     |
|x       xxxxxxxxxxxxx   x           +            + ++++++++++++++++++  +|
|           |__A__|                                                      |
|                                                      |____A___|        |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
    N           Min           Max        Median           Avg        Stddev
x 120         3.506         3.727         3.631     3.6321417    0.02773109
+ 120         3.834         4.149         4.039     4.0375167   0.041221676
Difference at 95.0% confidence
0.405375 +/- 0.00888913
11.1608% +/- 0.244735%
(Student's t, pooled s = 0.03513)

However, since the mean latency corresponds to the amount of irqsoff
processing we have to do for a CS interrupt, we only need to speed that
up to benefit not just system latency but our own throughput.

v2: Remember to defer submissions when under reset.
v4: Only use direct submission for new requests
v5: Be aware that with mixing direct tasklet evaluation and deferred
tasklets, we may end up idling before running the deferred tasklet.
v6: Remove the redudant likely() from tasklet_is_enabled(), restrict the
annotation to reset_in_progress().
v7: Take the full timeline.lock when enabling perf_pmu stats as the
tasklet is no longer a valid guard. A consequence is that the stats are
now only valid for engines also using the timeline.lock to process
state.

Testcase: igt/gem_exec_latency/*rthog*
References: 27af5eea54d1 ("drm/i915: Move execlists irq handler to a bottom half")
Suggested-by: Tvrtko Ursulin <tvrtko.ursulin@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>
Cc: Tvrtko Ursulin <tvrtko.ursulin@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Tvrtko Ursulin <tvrtko.ursulin@intel.com>
Link: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/msgid/20180628201211.13837-9-chris@chris-wilson.co.uk
drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem.h
drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_engine_cs.c
drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_lrc.c