Re: [Mesa-dev] [RFC] Linux Graphics Next: Explicit fences everywhere and no BO fences - initial proposal

[Bas Nieuwenhuizen <bas@basnieuwenhuizen.nl>]

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On Tue, Apr 20, 2021 at 8:16 PM Daniel Stone <daniel@fooishbar.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 20 Apr 2021 at 19:00, Christian König <
> ckoenig.leichtzumerken@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Am 20.04.21 um 19:44 schrieb Daniel Stone:
>>
>> But winsys is something _completely_ different. Yes, you're using the GPU
>> to do things with buffers A, B, and C to produce buffer Z. Yes, you're
>> using vkQueuePresentKHR to schedule that work. Yes, Mutter's composition
>> job might depend on a Chromium composition job which depends on GTA's
>> render job which depends on GTA's compute job which might take a year to
>> complete. Mutter's composition job needs to complete in 'reasonable'
>> (again, FSVO) time, no matter what. The two are compatible.
>>
>> How? Don't lump them together. Isolate them aggressively, and
>> _predictably_ in a way that you can reason about.
>>
>> What clients do in their own process space is their own business. Games
>> can deadlock themselves if they get wait-before-signal wrong. Compute jobs
>> can run for a year. Their problem. Winsys is not that, because you're
>> crossing every isolation boundary possible. Process, user, container, VM -
>> every kind of privilege boundary. Thus far, dma_fence has protected us from
>> the most egregious abuses by guaranteeing bounded-time completion; it also
>> acts as a sequencing primitive, but from the perspective of a winsys person
>> that's of secondary importance, which is probably one of the bigger
>> disconnects between winsys people and GPU driver people.
>>
>>
>> Finally somebody who understands me :)
>>
>> Well the question is then how do we get winsys and your own process space
>> together then?
>>
>
> It's a jarring transition. If you take a very narrow view and say 'it's
> all GPU work in shared buffers so it should all work the same', then
> client<->winsys looks the same as client<->client gbuffer. But this is a
> trap.
>

I think this is where I think we have have a serious gap of what a winsys
or a compositor is. Like if you have only a single wayland server running
on a physical machine this is easy. But add a VR compositor, an
intermediate compositor (say gamescope), Xwayland and some containers/VM,
some video capture  (or, gasp, a browser that doubles as compositor) and
this story gets seriously complicated. Like who are you protecting from
who? at what point is something client<->winsys vs. client<->client?



> Just because you can mmap() a file on an NFS server in New Zealand doesn't
> mean that you should have the same expectations of memory access to that
> file as you do to of a pointer from alloca(). Even if the primitives look
> the same, you are crossing significant boundaries, and those do not come
> without a compromise and a penalty.
>
>
>> Anyway, one of the great things about winsys (there are some! trust me)
>> is we don't need to be as hopelessly general as for game engines, nor as
>> hyperoptimised. We place strict demands on our clients, and we literally
>> kill them every single time they get something wrong in a way that's
>> visible to us. Our demands on the GPU are so embarrassingly simple that you
>> can run every modern desktop environment on GPUs which don't have unified
>> shaders. And on certain platforms who don't share tiling formats between
>> texture/render-target/scanout ... and it all still runs fast enough that
>> people don't complain.
>>
>>
>> Ignoring everything below since that is the display pipeline I'm not
>> really interested in. My concern is how to get the buffer from the client
>> to the server without allowing the client to get the server into trouble?
>>
>> My thinking is still to use timeouts to acquire texture locks. E.g. when
>> the compositor needs to access texture it grabs a lock and if that lock
>> isn't available in less than 20ms whoever is holding it is killed hard and
>> the lock given to the compositor.
>>
>> It's perfectly fine if a process has a hung queue, but if it tries to
>> send buffers which should be filled by that queue to the compositor it just
>> gets a corrupted window content.
>>
>
> Kill the client hard. If the compositor has speculatively queued sampling
> against rendering which never completed, let it access garbage. You'll have
> one frame of garbage (outdated content, all black, random pattern; the
> failure mode is equally imperfect, because there is no perfect answer),
> then the compositor will notice the client has disappeared and remove all
> its resources.
>
> It's not possible to completely prevent this situation if the compositor
> wants to speculatively pipeline work, only ameliorate it. From a
> system-global point of view, just expose the situation and let it bubble
> up. Watch the number of fences which failed to retire in time, and destroy
> the context if there are enough of them (maybe 1, maybe 100). Watch the
> number of contexts the file description get forcibly destroyed, and destroy
> the file description if there are enough of them. Watch the number of
> descriptions which get forcibly destroyed, and destroy the process if there
> are enough of them. Watch the number of processes in a cgroup/pidns which
> get forcibly destroyed, and destroy the ... etc. Whether it's the DRM
> driver or an external monitor such as systemd/Flatpak/podman/Docker doing
> that is pretty immaterial, as long as the concept of failure bubbling up
> remains.
>
> (20ms is objectively the wrong answer FWIW, because we're not a hard RTOS.
> But if our biggest point of disagreement is 20 vs. 200 vs. 2000 vs. 20000
> ms, then this thread has been a huge success!)
>
> Cheers,
> Daniel
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>

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