On Fri, 2007-12-07 at 11:15 +0000, Keith Whitwell wrote:
> Keith,
> 
> Thomas has just left for two weeks of (well deserved!) holiday, so he 
> may be slow to respond.

Thanks for taking the time to have a look while he's away; we're
finishing up the 965 TTM work, and it is posing some challenges with the
existing kernel interface.

> In the meantime, have you considered how this will interact with 
> userspace buffer pools?

No, I hadn't considered that as we're not considering a two-level
allocation strategy at this point.

However, if you consider the blocking patch in conjunction with the
presumed_offset optimization, I think you'll find that userspace buffer
pools will not actually be affected negatively by this change.

The presumed_offset optimization allows the application to compute all
relocations itself for target buffers which have been mapped to the
hardware. The kernel relocations are purely a back-up, for cases where
buffers move between EXECBUFFER invocations.

>   I know you guys aren't using them at this 
> point, but I'm of the opinion that they are an important facility which 
> needs to be preserved.  At worst it may be that some additional flag is 
> needed to control this behaviour.

We could do this, but I believe this would actually require more
blocking by the client -- it doesn't know when objects are moving in the
kernel, so it doesn't know when relocation data will need to be
rewritten.

> Secondly I wonder whether this isn't already caught by other aspects of 
> the buffer manager behaviour?

> ie, if the buffer to which the relocation points to is being moved, 
> doesn't that imply all hardware activity related to that buffer must 
> have concluded?  IE, if the buffer itself is free to move, surely all 
> commands containing relocations (or chains of relocations) which point 
> to the buffer must themselves have completed??

Yes, if the target buffer is moving, then the operation related to the
relocatee will have been completed and waited for. But, re-writing
relocations doesn't require that the buffers have moved. 

Consider the case of the binding table on 965 which points at surface
state structures. Executing a command that uses the binding table will
require that relocations be evaluated for the entries in the table; even
if nothing moves (ignoring my presumed_offset optimization), those
relocations will need to be evaluated and the surface state pointers
stored to the binding table.

For the application to guarantee that the binding table relocations can
be written without the kernel needing to wait for the binding table
buffer to be idle, the application would have to wait every time, not
just when the buffer actually moves.

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