drm/i915: Expose the busyspin durations for i915_wait_request

An interesting discussion regarding "hybrid interrupt polling" for NVMe
came to the conclusion that the ideal busyspin before sleeping was half
of the expected request latency (and better if it was already halfway
through that request). This suggested that we too should look again at
our tradeoff between spinning and waiting. Currently, our spin simply
tries to hide the cost of enabling the interrupt, which is good to avoid
penalising nop requests (i.e. test throughput) and not much else.
Studying real world workloads suggests that a spin of upto 500us can
dramatically boost performance, but the suggestion is that this is not
from avoiding interrupt latency per-se, but from secondary effects of
sleeping such as allowing the CPU reduce cstate and context switch away.

In a truly hybrid interrupt polling scheme, we would aim to sleep until
just before the request completed and then wake up in advance of the
interrupt and do a quick poll to handle completion. This is tricky for
ourselves at the moment as we are not recording request times, and since
we allow preemption, our requests are not on as a nicely ordered
timeline as IO. However, the idea is interesting, for it will certainly
help us decide when busyspinning is worthwhile.

v2: Expose the spin setting via Kconfig options for easier adjustment
and testing.
v3: Don't get caught sneaking in a change to the busyspin parameters.
v4: Explain more about the "hybrid interrupt polling" scheme that we
want to migrate towards.

Suggested-by: Sagar Kamble <sagar.a.kamble@intel.com>
References: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/lemoal-nvme-polling-vault-2017-final_0.pdf
Signed-off-by: Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>
Cc: Sagar Kamble <sagar.a.kamble@intel.com>
Cc: Eero Tamminen <eero.t.tamminen@intel.com>
Cc: Tvrtko Ursulin <tvrtko.ursulin@intel.com>
Cc: Ben Widawsky <ben@bwidawsk.net>
Cc: Joonas Lahtinen <joonas.lahtinen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Michał Winiarski <michal.winiarski@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Sagar Kamble <sagar.a.kamble@intel.com>
Link: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/msgid/20190419182625.11186-1-chris@chris-wilson.co.uk

1 files changed, 13 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/Kconfig.profile b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/Kconfig.profile
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..0e5db98da8f3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/Kconfig.profile
@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
+config DRM_I915_SPIN_REQUEST
+	int
+	default 5 # microseconds
+	help
+	  Before sleeping waiting for a request (GPU operation) to complete,
+	  we may spend some time polling for its completion. As the IRQ may
+	  take a non-negligible time to setup, we do a short spin first to
+	  check if the request will complete in the time it would have taken
+	  us to enable the interrupt.
+
+	  May be 0 to disable the initial spin. In practice, we estimate
+	  the cost of enabling the interrupt (if currently disabled) to be
+	  a few microseconds.