On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 10:40 AM Christian König <christian.koenig@amd.com> wrote:
Am 28.05.20 um 12:06 schrieb Michel Dänzer:
> On 2020-05-28 11:11 a.m., Christian König wrote:
>> Well we still need implicit sync [...]
> Yeah, this isn't about "we don't want implicit sync", it's about "amdgpu
> doesn't ensure later jobs fully see the effects of previous implicitly
> synced jobs", requiring userspace to do pessimistic flushing.

Yes, exactly that.

For the background: We also do this flushing for explicit syncs. And
when this was implemented 2-3 years ago we first did the flushing for
implicit sync as well.

That was immediately reverted and then implemented differently because
it caused severe performance problems in some use cases.

I'm not sure of the root cause of this performance problems. My
assumption was always that we then insert to many pipeline syncs, but
Marek doesn't seem to think it could be that.

On the one hand I'm rather keen to remove the extra handling and just
always use the explicit handling for everything because it simplifies
the kernel code quite a bit. On the other hand I don't want to run into
this performance problem again.

Additional to that what the kernel does is a "full" pipeline sync, e.g.
we busy wait for the full hardware pipeline to drain. That might be
overkill if you just want to do some flushing so that the next shader
sees the stuff written, but I'm not an expert on that.

Do we busy-wait on the CPU or in WAIT_REG_MEM?

WAIT_REG_MEM is what UMDs do and should be faster.

Marek