Re: [PATCH 17/18] drm/i915: Use a slab for object allocation

[Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>]

On Mon, 5 Nov 2012 17:49:35 +0000, Ben Widawsky <ben@bwidawsk.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 19 Oct 2012 18:03:23 +0100
> Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> > The primary purpose of this was to debug some use-after-free memory
> > corruption that was causing an OOPS inside drm/i915. As it turned out
> > the corruption was being caused elsewhere and i915.ko as a major user of
> > many objects was being hit hardest.
> > 
> > Indeed as we do frequent the generic kmalloc caches, dedicating one to
> > ourselves (or at least naming one for us depending upon the core) aids
> > debugging our own slab usage.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>
> > Reviewed-by: Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@virtuousgeek.org>
> 
> So I previously acked this patch, but you dropped that, so now you get
> more words.
> 
> Why not go all the way and move all allocations we do in i915 to this
> slab (adding a flag with whether or not to zero the memory first)? While
> I agree in terms of space, nothing takes up as much as objects, I think
> it would be nice to do this so we can totally track what our driver is
> doing. In fact I would suggest this is something which core drm should
> provide to all of the drivers (we already use drm_alloc calls in some
> places).

I thought the slab cache was a fixed size, so presumably you mean
introduce a slab per object we allocate? Of which the only other
interesting one is the requests. And we don't tend to have many requests
pending at any one time (outside of exceptional error cases), unlike the
thousands of bo that tend to be allocated. So is it worth dedicating a
separate slab to the few but frequently allocated requests?
-Chris

-- 
Chris Wilson, Intel Open Source Technology Centre