+ Some more Cc's based on IRC discussion Quoting Joonas Lahtinen (2018-04-05 16:46:51) > + Dave for commenting from DRM subsystem perspective. I strongly believe > there would be benefit from agreeing on some foundation of DRM subsystem > level program GPU niceness [-20,19] and memory limit [0,N] pages. > > Quoting Matt Roper (2018-03-30 03:43:13) > > On Mon, Mar 26, 2018 at 10:30:23AM +0300, Joonas Lahtinen wrote: > > > Quoting Matt Roper (2018-03-23 17:46:16) > > > > On Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 02:15:38PM +0200, Joonas Lahtinen wrote: > > > > > Quoting Matt Roper (2018-03-17 02:08:57) > > > > > > This is the fourth iteration of the work previously posted here: > > > > > > (v1) https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/intel-gfx/2018-January/153156.html > > > > > > (v2) https://www.mail-archive.com/dri-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/msg208170.html > > > > > > (v3) https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/intel-gfx/2018-March/157928.html > > > > > > > > > > > > The high level goal of this work is to allow non-cgroup-controller parts > > > > > > of the kernel (e.g., device drivers) to register their own private > > > > > > policy data for specific cgroups. That mechanism is then made use of in > > > > > > the i915 graphics driver to allow GPU priority to be assigned according > > > > > > to the cgroup membership of the owning process. Please see the v1 cover > > > > > > letter linked above for a more in-depth explanation and justification. > > > > > > > > > > Hi Matt, > > > > > > > > > > For cross-subsystem changes such as this, it makes sense to Cc all > > > > > relevant maintainers, especially if there have been previous comments to > > > > > earlier revisions. > > > > > > > > > > Please, do include and keep a reference to the userspace portion of the > > > > > changes when you suggest new uAPI to be added. At least I have some trouble > > > > > trying to track down the relevant interface consumer here. > > > > > > > > > > I'm unsure how much sense it makes to commence with detailed i915 review > > > > > if we will be blocked by lack of userspace after that? I'm assuming > > > > > you've read through [1] already. > > > > > > > > Hi Joonas, > > > > > > > > I've sent the userspace code out a few times, but it looks like I forgot > > > > to include a copy with v4/v4.5. Here's the version I provided with v3: > > > > https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/intel-gfx/2018-March/157935.html > > > > > > Thanks. Keeping that in the relevant commit message of the patch that > > > introduces the new uAPI will make it harder to forget and easiest for > > > git blame, too. > > > > > > > > > > > Usually we don't consider things like i-g-t to be sufficient userspace > > > > consumers because we need a real-world consumer rather than a "toy" > > > > userspace. However in this case, the i-g-t tool, although very simple, > > > > is really the only userspace consumer I expect there to ever be. > > > > Ultimately the true consumer of this cgroups work are bash scripts, sysv > > > > init scripts, systemd recipes, etc. that just need a very simple tool > > > > to assign the specific values that make sense on a given system. > > > > There's no expectation that graphics clients or display servers would > > > > ever need to make use of these interfaces. > > > > > > I was under the impression that a bit more generic GPU cgroups support > > > was receiving a lot of support in the early discussion? A dedicated > > > intel_cgroup sounds underwhelming, when comparing to idea of "gpu_nice", > > > for user adoption :) > > > > I'm open to moving the cgroup_priv registration/lookup to the DRM core > > if other drivers are interested in using this mechanism and if we can > > come to an agreement on a standard priority offset range to support, how > > display boost should work for all drivers, etc. There might be some > > challenges mapping a DRM-defined priority range down to a different > > range that makes sense for individual driver schedulers, especially > > since some drivers already expose a different priority scheme to > > userspace via other interfaces like i915 does with GEM context priority. > > > > So far I haven't really heard any interest outside the Intel camp, but > > hopefully other driver teams can speak up if they're for/against this. > > I don't want to try to artificially standardize this if other drivers > > want to go a different direction with priority/scheduling that's too > > different from the current Intel-driven design. > > I don't think there are that many directions to go about GPU context > priority, considering we have the EGL_IMG_context_priority extension, so > it'll only be about granularity of the scale. > > I would suggest to go with the nice like scale for easy user adoption, > then just apply that as the N most significant bits. > > The contexts could then of course further adjust their priority from what > is set by the "gpu_nice" application with the remaining bits. > > I'm strongly feeling this should be a DRM level "gpu_nice". And the > binding to cgroups should come through DRM core. If it doesn't, limiting > the amount of memory used becomes awkward as the allocation is > centralized to DRM core. > > > > Also, I might not be up-to-date about all things cgroups, but the way > > > intel_cgroup works, feels bit forced. We create a userspace context just > > > to communicate with the driver and the IOCTL will still have global > > > effects. I can't but think that i915 reading from the cgroups subsystem > > > for the current process would feel more intuitive to me. > > > > I think you're referring to the earlier discussion about exposing > > priority directly via the cgroups filesystem? That would certainly be > > simpler from a userspace perspective, but it's not the direction that > > the cgroups maintainer wants to see things go. Adding files directly to > > the cgroups filesystem is supposed to be something that's reserved for > > official cgroups controllers. The GPU priority concept we're trying to > > add here doesn't align with the requirements for creating a controller, > > so the preferred approach is to create a custom interface (syscall or > > ioctl) that simply takes a cgroup as a parameter. There's precendent > > with similar interfaces in areas like BPF (where the bpf() system call > > can accept a cgroup as a parameter and then perform its own private > > policy changes as it sees fit). > > > > Using a true cgroups controller and exposing settings via the filesystem > > is likely still the way we'll want to go for some other types of > > cgroups-based policy in the future (e.g., limiting GPU memory usage); it > > just isn't the appropriate direction for priority. > > Might be just me but feels bit crazy to be setting GPU memory usage > through another interface and then doing i915 specific IOCTLs to control > the priority of that same cgroup. > > I don't feel comfortable adding custom cgroups dependent IOCTLs to i915 > where cgroups is only working as the variable carrier in background. We > should really just be consuming a variable from cgroups and it should be > set outside of of the i915 IOCTL interface. > > I'm still seeing that we should have a DRM cgroups controller and a DRM > subsystem wide application to control the priority and memory usage > to be fed to the drivers. > > If we end up just supporting i915 apps, we could as well use LD_PRELOAD > wrapper and alter the context priority at creation time for exactly the > same effect and no extra interfaces to maintain. > > > > Does the implementation mimic some existing cgroups tool or de-facto way > > > of doing things in cgroups world? > > > > The ioctl approach I took is similar to syscall approach that the BPF > > guys use to attach BPF programs to a cgroup. I'm not very familiar with > > BPF or how it gets used from userspace, so I'm not sure whether the > > interface is intended for one specific tool (like ours is), or whether > > there's more variety for userspace consumers. > > Is the proposal to set the memory usage from similar interface, or is > that still not implemented? > > I'm seeing a very close relation between time-slicing GPU time and > allowed GPU buffer allocations, so having two completely different > interfaces does just feel very hackish way of implementing this. > > Regards, Joonas > > > > > > > Matt > > > > > > > > Regards, Joonas > > > -- > > > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe cgroups" in > > > the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > > > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > > > > -- > > Matt Roper > > Graphics Software Engineer > > IoTG Platform Enabling & Development > > Intel Corporation > > (916) 356-2795 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe cgroups" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
