drm/i915: Enable userspace to opt-out of implicit fencing

Userspace is faced with a dilemma. The kernel requires implicit fencing
to manage resource usage (we always must wait for the GPU to finish
before releasing its PTE) and for third parties. However, userspace may
wish to avoid this serialisation if it is either using explicit fencing
between parties and wants more fine-grained access to buffers (e.g. it
may partition the buffer between uses and track fences on ranges rather
than the implicit fences tracking the whole object). It follows that
userspace needs a mechanism to avoid the kernel's serialisation on its
implicit fences before execbuf execution.

The next question is whether this is an object, execbuf or context flag.
Hybrid users (such as using explicit EGL_ANDROID_native_sync fencing on
shared winsys buffers, but implicit fencing on internal surfaces)
require a per-object level flag. Given that this flag need to be only
set once for the lifetime of the object, this reduces the convenience of
having an execbuf or context level flag (and avoids having multiple
pieces of uABI controlling the same feature).

Incorrect use of this flag will result in rendering corruption and GPU
hangs - but will not result in use-after-free or similar resource
tracking issues.

Serious caveat: write ordering is not strictly correct after setting
this flag on a render target on multiple engines. This affects all
subsequent GEM operations (execbuf, set-domain, pread) and shared
dma-buf operations. A fix is possible - but costly (both in terms of
further ABI changes and runtime overhead).

Testcase: igt/gem_exec_async
Signed-off-by: Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>
Reviewed-by: Joonas Lahtinen <joonas.lahtinen@linux.intel.com>
Acked-by: Chad Versace <chadversary@chromium.org>
Link: http://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/msgid/20170127094008.27489-1-chris@chris-wilson.co.uk

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem_execbuffer.c b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem_execbuffer.c
index c66e905..6fd6068 100644
--- a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem_execbuffer.c
+++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem_execbuffer.c
@@ -1111,6 +1111,9 @@ i915_gem_execbuffer_move_to_gpu(struct drm_i915_gem_request *req,
 	list_for_each_entry(vma, vmas, exec_list) {
 		struct drm_i915_gem_object *obj = vma->obj;
 
+		if (vma->exec_entry->flags & EXEC_OBJECT_ASYNC)
+			continue;
+
 		ret = i915_gem_request_await_object
 			(req, obj, obj->base.pending_write_domain);
 		if (ret)