Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org designates 2620:137:e000::1:20 as permitted sender) client-ip=2620:137:e000::1:20;
Message-ID: <e39905e4-74e5-4de7-626c-2f2794214813@collabora.com>
Date:   Mon, 31 Jul 2023 15:31:25 +0300
MIME-Version: 1.0
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/102.11.1
Subject: Re: [PATCH v14 02/12] drm/shmem-helper: Add pages_pin_count field
Content-Language: en-US
From:   Dmitry Osipenko <dmitry.osipenko@collabora.com>
To:     Boris Brezillon <boris.brezillon@collabora.com>
Cc:     David Airlie <airlied@gmail.com>,
        Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com>,
        Gurchetan Singh <gurchetansingh@chromium.org>,
        Chia-I Wu <olvaffe@gmail.com>, Daniel Vetter <daniel@ffwll.ch>,
        Maarten Lankhorst <maarten.lankhorst@linux.intel.com>,
        Maxime Ripard <mripard@kernel.org>,
        Thomas Zimmermann <tzimmermann@suse.de>,
        =?UTF-8?Q?Christian_K=c3=b6nig?= <christian.koenig@amd.com>,
        Qiang Yu <yuq825@gmail.com>,
        Steven Price <steven.price@arm.com>,
        Emma Anholt <emma@anholt.net>, Melissa Wen <mwen@igalia.com>,
        dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        kernel@collabora.com, virtualization@lists.linux-foundation.org
References: <20230722234746.205949-1-dmitry.osipenko@collabora.com>
 <20230722234746.205949-3-dmitry.osipenko@collabora.com>
 <20230725092709.51356f39@collabora.com>
 <20230725103234.0c8923f1@collabora.com>
 <4c5fa735-9bfd-f92a-8deb-888c7368f89e@collabora.com>
In-Reply-To: <4c5fa735-9bfd-f92a-8deb-888c7368f89e@collabora.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Precedence: bulk

On 7/31/23 15:27, Dmitry Osipenko wrote:
> On 7/25/23 11:32, Boris Brezillon wrote:
>>> Can we make it an atomic_t, so we can avoid taking the lock when the
>>> GEM has already been pinned. That's something I need to be able to grab
>>> a pin-ref in a path where the GEM resv lock is already held[1]. We could
>>> of course expose the locked version,
>> My bad, that's actually not true. The problem is not that I call
>> drm_gem_shmem_pin() with the resv lock already held, but that I call
>> drm_gem_shmem_pin() in a dma-signaling path where I'm not allowed to
>> take a resv lock. I know for sure pin_count > 0, because all GEM objects
>> mapped to a VM have their memory pinned right now, and this should
>> stand until we decide to add support for live-GEM eviction, at which
>> point we'll probably have a way to detect when a GEM is evicted, and
>> avoid calling drm_gem_shmem_pin() on it.
>>
>> TLDR; I can't trade the atomic_t for a drm_gem_shmem_pin_locked(),
>> because that wouldn't solve my problem. The other solution would be to
>> add an atomic_t at the driver-GEM level, and only call
>> drm_gem_shmem_[un]pin() on 0 <-> 1 transitions, but I thought using an
>> atomic at the GEM-shmem level, to avoid locking when we can, would be
>> beneficial to the rest of the eco-system. Let me know if that's not an
>> option, and I'll go back to the driver-specific atomic_t.
> 
> Could you please explain why do you need to pin GEM in a signal handler?
> This is not something drivers usually do or need to do. You likely also
> shouldn't need to detect that GEM is evicted in yours driver. I'd expect
> that Panthor shouldn't differ from Panfrost in regards to how GEM memory
> management is done and Panfrost doesn't need to do anything special.
> 
> Note that patch #14 makes locked pin/unpin functions public and turns
> the unlocked variants into helpers, you'll be able to experiment with
> these funcs in the Panthor driver.

correction: that's patch #10

> In general, using atomic_t or kref should be a good thing to do, but
> AFAICS it shouldn't bring benefits to the today's drm-shmem users. I'd
> want to understand what you're trying to achieve in the Panthor driver.
> 

-- 
Best regards,
Dmitry