Re: [PATCH 24/51] drm/i915: Update deferred context creation to do explicit request management

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On 13/02/2015 12:15, Chris Wilson wrote:
On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 11:48:33AM +0000, John.C.Harrison@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
From: John Harrison <John.C.Harrison@xxxxxxxxx>

In execlist mode, context initialisation is deferred until first use of the
given context. This is because execlist mode has many more contexts than legacy
mode and many are never actually used.
That's not correct. There are no more contexts in execlists than legacy.
There are more ringbuffers, or rather the contexts have an extra state
object associated with them.
Okay, I should have said sub-contexts. Or context state objects. Or something.


Previously, the initialisation commands
were written to the ring and tagged with some random request structure via the
OLR. This seemed to be causing a null pointer deference bug under certain
circumstances (BZ:40112).

This patch adds explicit request creation and submission to the deferred
initialisation code path. Thus removing any reliance on or randomness caused by
the OLR.
This is upside down though. The request should be referencing the
context (thus instantiating it on demand) and nothing in the context
allocation requires the request. The initialisation here should be during
i915_request_switch_context(), since it can be entirely shared with
legacy.
-Chris

The request does reference the context - the alloc_reques() function takes a context object as a parameter. Thus it is impossible for the request to be used/supplied/required during context creation. The issue here is the lazy initialisation of the per ring context state which requires sending commands to the ring on first usage of the given context object on the given ring.

One problem is that the initialisation request and the batch buffer request cannot be merged at the moment. They both use request->batch_obj for tracking the command object. Thus this patch only works due to the deferred intialisation occurring during the i915_gem_validate_context() call very early on in execbuffer() rather than as part of the context switch within the batch buffer execution which is much later.

I'm not sure what you mean by i915_request_switch_context(). The existing i915_switch_context() does now take just a request structure rather than a ring/ringbuf/context mixture. However, it is not really a good idea to do the context switch automatically as part of creating the request. The request creation and request execution could be quite separated in time, especially with a scheduler.

It should be possible to move the deferred initialisation within the context switch if the object tracking can be resolved. Thus they could share the same request and there would not be effectively two separate execution calls at the hardware level. Again, that's potentially work that could be done as a follow up task of improving the context management independent of the current task of removing the OLR.

John.

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