From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Daniel Vetter Subject: Re: [RFC] manage multiple entries of scratch page with scatterlist Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2014 09:26:02 +0200 Message-ID: <20140612072602.GU5821@phenom.ffwll.local> References: <5398EB1B.6070208@linux.intel.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from mail-we0-f181.google.com (mail-we0-f181.google.com [74.125.82.181]) by gabe.freedesktop.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C353C6E8E1 for ; Thu, 12 Jun 2014 00:26:08 -0700 (PDT) Received: by mail-we0-f181.google.com with SMTP id q59so786727wes.40 for ; Thu, 12 Jun 2014 00:26:07 -0700 (PDT) Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <5398EB1B.6070208@linux.intel.com> List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: intel-gfx-bounces@lists.freedesktop.org Sender: "Intel-gfx" To: "Siluvery, Arun" Cc: "intel-gfx@lists.freedesktop.org" List-Id: intel-gfx@lists.freedesktop.org On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 12:49:47AM +0100, Siluvery, Arun wrote: > Hi, > > I am working on a feature to implement support for gem objects to have > variable size and realized a problem with the current implementation. > Please advice me how to handle this situation efficiently. > > In this implementation the backing store of the object is replaced with > scratch pages according to input range; Initially I store table entries in > an array, replace relevant entries with scratch pages and I am using > sg_alloc_table_from_pages() to create new sg_table which is assigned to the > object. This implementation works as expected but I realized it is wasting > memory as scratch page count increases. > > Consider the worst case scenario where all pages are replaced with scratch > pages. > > The fn sg_alloc_table_from_pages() first computes the number of chunks based > on the page frame numbers. PFNs that are consecutive form a chunk and it > allocates scatterlists for each chunk which form the sg_table. > > In case of scratch pages they get the same pfn for each page and > sg_alloc_table_from_pages() considers them not part of a chunk and it > allocates scatterlist structure for each scratch page which takes lot of > memory as the object size increases. > > I have to tried to modify sg_alloc_table_from_pages() implementation to > check for scratch pfn and consider them as single chunk but after the update > when iterating through for_each_sg_page() I am seeing different page > addresses instead of all pointing to scratch page. > > Eg. In an object of size 8 pages, scratch_page = ffffea0001120000 and pfn: > 0x00044800, the result I get is, > > page[0]: ffffea0001120000, pfn: 0x00044800, > page[1]: ffffea0001120040, pfn: 0x00044801, > page[2]: ffffea0001120080, pfn: 0x00044802, > page[3]: ffffea00011200c0, pfn: 0x00044803, > page[4]: ffffea0001120100, pfn: 0x00044804, > page[5]: ffffea0001120140, pfn: 0x00044805, > page[6]: ffffea0001120180, pfn: 0x00044806, > page[7]: ffffea00011201c0, pfn: 0x00044807, > > How to manage multiple pages that have same pfn with a single scatterlist > and still have it's length equal to (PAGE_SIZE*chunk_size)? > > I would really appreciate any suggestions to improve this implementation. sg tables don't have the idea of repeating a given page, since it doesn't make a lot of sense. Is the memory overhead really a big problem? Extending the sg implementation with a flag somewhere to repeat a given page instead of incrementing might be possible. But will be a bit of effort to push that through the process since we'll touch code outside of drm. -Daniel -- Daniel Vetter Software Engineer, Intel Corporation +41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch