I think we can also have the case of systems with similar amounts of carve out 
and system ram.  E.g., on a system with 4 GB of system memory with 1 GB carved 
out for vram.  It would be a big waste not to use VRAM.  We'll probably need a 
heuristic at some point.


Alex

________________________________
From: Christian König <ckoenig.leichtzumer...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2018 2:32:49 PM
To: Marek Olšák; Koenig, Christian
Cc: Alex Deucher; Deucher, Alexander; Michel Dänzer; Li, Samuel; amd-gfx list
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] drm/amdgpu: Enable scatter gather display support

I don't think that is a good idea.

Ideally GTT should now have the same performance as VRAM on APUs and we should 
use VRAM only for things where we absolutely have to and to actually use up the 
otherwise unused VRAM.

Can you run some tests with all BOs forced to GTT and see if there is any 
performance regression?

Christian.

Am 20.03.2018 um 15:51 schrieb Marek Olšák:
On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 9:55 AM, Christian König 
<ckoenig.leichtzumer...@gmail.com<mailto:ckoenig.leichtzumer...@gmail.com>> 
wrote:
Yes, exactly. And if I remember correctly Mesa used to always set GTT as 
fallback on APUs, correct?

"used to" is the key part. Mesa doesn't force GTT on APUs anymore. It expects 
that the combination of BO priorities and BO move throttling will result in 
optimal BO placements over time.

Marek


The problem seems to be that this fallback isn't set for displayable BOs.

So what needs to be done is to just enable this fallback for displayable BOs as 
well if the kernel can handle it.

Christian.


Am 20.03.2018 um 00:01 schrieb Marek Olšák:
In theory, Mesa doesn't have to do anything. It can continue setting VRAM and 
if the kernel has to put a display buffer into GTT, it doesn't matter (for 
Mesa). Whether the VRAM placement is really used is largely determined by BO 
priorities.

The way I understand scather/gather is that it only allows the GTT placement. 
It doesn't force the GTT placement. Mesa also doesn't force the GTT placement.

Marek

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 5:12 PM, Alex Deucher 
<alexdeuc...@gmail.com<mailto:alexdeuc...@gmail.com>> wrote:
On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 4:29 PM, Li, Samuel 
<samuel...@amd.com<mailto:samuel...@amd.com>> wrote:
>>to my earlier point, there may be cases where it is advantageous to put
>> display buffers in vram even if s/g display is supported
>
> Agreed. That is also why the patch has the options to let user select where
> to put display buffers.
>
> As whether to put the option in Mesa or kernel, it seems the difference is
> not much. Also, since amdgpufb can request even without mesa, kernel might
> be a better choice. In addition, putting in the kernel can save client’s
> duplicate work(mesa, ogl, vulkan, 2d, kernel…)

Why do we even expose different memory pools to the UMDs in the first
place ;)  Each pool has performance characteristics that may be
relevant for a particular work load.  Only the UMDs really know the
finer points of those workloads. In general, you don't want the kernel
dictating policy if you can avoid it.  The kernel exposes
functionality and userspace sets the policy.  With the location set in
userspace, each app/user can have whatever policy makes sense for
their use case all at the same time without needing to tweak their
kernel for every use case.

Alex



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