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[2/2] drm/i915: disable indirect state pointers in render flush

Message ID 1343220704-4210-2-git-send-email-daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch (mailing list archive)
State New, archived
Headers show

Commit Message

Daniel Vetter July 25, 2012, 12:51 p.m. UTC
Since we don't guarantee that objects stay at the same gtt offset,
userspace needs to reload all indirect state anyway, even with hw
contexts. The hw provides a little pipe_control flag to disable at
least some these indirect state pointers and hence avoid to
save/restore them at context switch time.

Seems to improve hw context switch throughput as measured by running
glxgears by about 0.5%, barely above the noise on my ivb gt2 here.

Signed-Off-by: Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch>
---
 drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_ringbuffer.c |    1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

Comments

Eric Anholt July 26, 2012, 5:33 p.m. UTC | #1
Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch> writes:

> Since we don't guarantee that objects stay at the same gtt offset,
> userspace needs to reload all indirect state anyway, even with hw
> contexts. The hw provides a little pipe_control flag to disable at
> least some these indirect state pointers and hence avoid to
> save/restore them at context switch time.
>
> Seems to improve hw context switch throughput as measured by running
> glxgears by about 0.5%, barely above the noise on my ivb gt2 here.

I'd like to see some better testing than picking an fps number out of
glxgears.  I'm dubious of there being any measurable effect here.  But
then, I haven't even been able to figure out from the specs what exactly
is considered to be "indirect state".
Daniel Vetter July 26, 2012, 5:47 p.m. UTC | #2
On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 7:33 PM, Eric Anholt <eric@anholt.net> wrote:
> Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch> writes:
>
>> Since we don't guarantee that objects stay at the same gtt offset,
>> userspace needs to reload all indirect state anyway, even with hw
>> contexts. The hw provides a little pipe_control flag to disable at
>> least some these indirect state pointers and hence avoid to
>> save/restore them at context switch time.
>>
>> Seems to improve hw context switch throughput as measured by running
>> glxgears by about 0.5%, barely above the noise on my ivb gt2 here.
>
> I'd like to see some better testing than picking an fps number out of
> glxgears.  I'm dubious of there being any measurable effect here.  But
> then, I haven't even been able to figure out from the specs what exactly
> is considered to be "indirect state".

I admit that the the glxgears number is rather pointless - it's meant
more as a quick sanity test that things don't go slower. The
motivation why I've done this is more that this could help in catching
mesa bugs, where for some odd reason some indirect state doesn't get
re-emitted (now with hw contexts that's harder to detect than just
running 2 drm clients in parallel). If the hw gives us a bit to clean
(at least parts) of that state out, I think we should use it to
improve testing coverage.
-Daniel
diff mbox

Patch

diff --git a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_ringbuffer.c b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_ringbuffer.c
index f52778f..bc95142 100644
--- a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_ringbuffer.c
+++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_ringbuffer.c
@@ -228,6 +228,7 @@  gen6_render_ring_flush(struct intel_ring_buffer *ring,
 	flags |= PIPE_CONTROL_VF_CACHE_INVALIDATE;
 	flags |= PIPE_CONTROL_CONST_CACHE_INVALIDATE;
 	flags |= PIPE_CONTROL_STATE_CACHE_INVALIDATE;
+	flags |= PIPE_CONTROL_INDIRECT_STATE_DISABLE;
 	if (IS_GEN7(ring->dev))
 		flags |= PIPE_CONTROL_DC_CACHE_FLUSH;
 	/*