drm/i915: Add background commentary to "waitboosting"

Describe the intent of boosting the GPU frequency to maximum before
waiting on the GPU.

RPS waitboosting was introduced with commit b29c19b64528 ("drm/i915:
Boost RPS frequency for CPU stalls") but lacked a concise comment in the
code to explain itself.

Signed-off-by: Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>
Reviewed-by: Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch>
Link: http://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/msgid/1467616119-4093-5-git-send-email-chris@chris-wilson.co.uk

diff --git a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem.c b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem.c
index 037b26e..b11884d 100644 (file)
--- a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem.c
+++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem.c
@@ -1462,6 +1462,21 @@ int __i915_wait_request(struct drm_i915_gem_request *req,
 
        trace_i915_gem_request_wait_begin(req);
 
+       /* This client is about to stall waiting for the GPU. In many cases
+        * this is undesirable and limits the throughput of the system, as
+        * many clients cannot continue processing user input/output whilst
+        * blocked. RPS autotuning may take tens of milliseconds to respond
+        * to the GPU load and thus incurs additional latency for the client.
+        * We can circumvent that by promoting the GPU frequency to maximum
+        * before we wait. This makes the GPU throttle up much more quickly
+        * (good for benchmarks and user experience, e.g. window animations),
+        * but at a cost of spending more power processing the workload
+        * (bad for battery). Not all clients even want their results
+        * immediately and for them we should just let the GPU select its own
+        * frequency to maximise efficiency. To prevent a single client from
+        * forcing the clocks too high for the whole system, we only allow
+        * each client to waitboost once in a busy period.
+        */
        if (INTEL_INFO(req->i915)->gen >= 6)
                gen6_rps_boost(req->i915, rps, req->emitted_jiffies);