Recently there was a fairly long thread about recoreable hardware page faults, how they can deadlock, and what to do about that.
While the discussion is still fresh I figured good time to try and document the conclusions a bit. This documentation section explains what's the potential problem, and the remedies we've discussed, roughly ordered from best to worst.
v2: Linus -> Linux typoe (Dave)
v3: - Make it clear drivers only need to implement one option (Christian) - Make it clearer that implicit sync is out the window with exclusive fences (Christian) - Add the fairly theoretical option of segementing the memory (either statically or through dynamic checks at runtime for which piece of memory is managed how) and explain why it's not a great idea (Felix)
References: https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/20210107030127.20393-1-Felix.Kuehling@amd.... Cc: Dave Airlie airlied@gmail.com Cc: Maarten Lankhorst maarten.lankhorst@linux.intel.com Cc: Thomas Hellström thomas.hellstrom@intel.com Cc: "Christian König" christian.koenig@amd.com Cc: Jerome Glisse jglisse@redhat.com Cc: Felix Kuehling felix.kuehling@amd.com Signed-off-by: Daniel Vetter daniel.vetter@intel.com Cc: Sumit Semwal sumit.semwal@linaro.org Cc: linux-media@vger.kernel.org Cc: linaro-mm-sig@lists.linaro.org --- Documentation/driver-api/dma-buf.rst | 76 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 76 insertions(+)
diff --git a/Documentation/driver-api/dma-buf.rst b/Documentation/driver-api/dma-buf.rst index a2133d69872c..7f37ec30d9fd 100644 --- a/Documentation/driver-api/dma-buf.rst +++ b/Documentation/driver-api/dma-buf.rst @@ -257,3 +257,79 @@ fences in the kernel. This means: userspace is allowed to use userspace fencing or long running compute workloads. This also means no implicit fencing for shared buffers in these cases. + +Recoverable Hardware Page Faults Implications +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ + +Modern hardware supports recoverable page faults, which has a lot of +implications for DMA fences. + +First, a pending page fault obviously holds up the work that's running on the +accelerator and a memory allocation is usually required to resolve the fault. +But memory allocations are not allowed to gate completion of DMA fences, which +means any workload using recoverable page faults cannot use DMA fences for +synchronization. Synchronization fences controlled by userspace must be used +instead. + +On GPUs this poses a problem, because current desktop compositor protocols on +Linux rely on DMA fences, which means without an entirely new userspace stack +built on top of userspace fences, they cannot benefit from recoverable page +faults. Specifically this means implicit synchronization will not be possible. +The exception is when page faults are only used as migration hints and never to +on-demand fill a memory request. For now this means recoverable page +faults on GPUs are limited to pure compute workloads. + +Furthermore GPUs usually have shared resources between the 3D rendering and +compute side, like compute units or command submission engines. If both a 3D +job with a DMA fence and a compute workload using recoverable page faults are +pending they could deadlock: + +- The 3D workload might need to wait for the compute job to finish and release + hardware resources first. + +- The compute workload might be stuck in a page fault, because the memory + allocation is waiting for the DMA fence of the 3D workload to complete. + +There are a few options to prevent this problem, one of which drivers need to +ensure: + +- Compute workloads can always be preempted, even when a page fault is pending + and not yet repaired. Not all hardware supports this. + +- DMA fence workloads and workloads which need page fault handling have + independent hardware resources to guarantee forward progress. This could be + achieved through e.g. through dedicated engines and minimal compute unit + reservations for DMA fence workloads. + +- The reservation approach could be further refined by only reserving the + hardware resources for DMA fence workloads when they are in-flight. This must + cover the time from when the DMA fence is visible to other threads up to + moment when fence is completed through dma_fence_signal(). + +- As a last resort, if the hardware provides no useful reservation mechanics, + all workloads must be flushed from the GPU when switching between jobs + requiring DMA fences or jobs requiring page fault handling: This means all DMA + fences must complete before a compute job with page fault handling can be + inserted into the scheduler queue. And vice versa, before a DMA fence can be + made visible anywhere in the system, all compute workloads must be preempted + to guarantee all pending GPU page faults are flushed. + +- Only a fairly theoretical option would be to untangle these dependencies when + allocating memory to repair hardware page faults, either through separate + memory blocks or runtime tracking of the full dependency graph of all DMA + fences. This results very wide impact on the kernel, since resolving the page + on the CPU side can itself involve a page fault. It is much more feasible and + robust to limit the impact of handling hardware page faults to the specific + driver. + +Note that workloads that run on independent hardware like copy engines or other +GPUs do not have any impact. This allows us to keep using DMA fences internally +in the kernel even for resolving hardware page faults, e.g. by using copy +engines to clear or copy memory needed to resolve the page fault. + +In some ways this page fault problem is a special case of the `Infinite DMA +Fences` discussions: Infinite fences from compute workloads are allowed to +depend on DMA fences, but not the other way around. And not even the page fault +problem is new, because some other CPU thread in userspace might +hit a page fault which holds up a userspace fence - supporting page faults on +GPUs doesn't anything fundamentally new.