Re: CONFIG_DMA_CMA causes ttm performance problems/hangs.

From: Mario Kleiner
Date: Tue Aug 12 2014 - 08:12:17 EST


On 08/11/2014 05:17 PM, Jerome Glisse wrote:
On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 12:11:21PM +0200, Thomas Hellstrom wrote:
On 08/10/2014 08:02 PM, Mario Kleiner wrote:
On 08/10/2014 01:03 PM, Thomas Hellstrom wrote:
On 08/10/2014 05:11 AM, Mario Kleiner wrote:
Resent this time without HTML formatting which lkml doesn't like.
Sorry.

On 08/09/2014 03:58 PM, Thomas Hellstrom wrote:
On 08/09/2014 03:33 PM, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
On August 9, 2014 1:39:39 AM EDT, Thomas
Hellstrom<thellstrom@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi.

Hey Thomas!

IIRC I don't think the TTM DMA pool allocates coherent pages more
than
one page at a time, and _if that's true_ it's pretty unnecessary for
the
dma subsystem to route those allocations to CMA. Maybe Konrad could
shed
some light over this?
It should allocate in batches and keep them in the TTM DMA pool for
some time to be reused.

The pages that it gets are in 4kb granularity though.
Then I feel inclined to say this is a DMA subsystem bug. Single page
allocations shouldn't get routed to CMA.

/Thomas
Yes, seems you're both right. I read through the code a bit more and
indeed the TTM DMA pool allocates only one page during each
dma_alloc_coherent() call, so it doesn't need CMA memory. The current
allocators don't check for single page CMA allocations and therefore
try to get it from the CMA area anyway, instead of skipping to the
much cheaper fallback.

So the callers of dma_alloc_from_contiguous() could need that little
optimization of skipping it if only one page is requested. For

dma_generic_alloc_coherent
<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=http://lxr.free-electrons.com/ident?i%3Ddma_generic_alloc_coherent&k=oIvRg1%2BdGAgOoM1BIlLLqw%3D%3D%0A&r=l5Ago9ekmVFZ3c4M6eauqrJWGwjf6fTb%2BP3CxbBFkVM%3D%0A&m=QQSN6uVpEiw6RuWLAfK%2FKWBFV5HspJUfDh4Y2mUz%2FH4%3D%0A&s=d1852625e2ab2ff07eb34a7f33fc1f55f7f13959912d5a6ce9316d23070ce939>

andintel_alloc_coherent
<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=http://lxr.free-electrons.com/ident?i%3Dintel_alloc_coherent&k=oIvRg1%2BdGAgOoM1BIlLLqw%3D%3D%0A&r=l5Ago9ekmVFZ3c4M6eauqrJWGwjf6fTb%2BP3CxbBFkVM%3D%0A&m=QQSN6uVpEiw6RuWLAfK%2FKWBFV5HspJUfDh4Y2mUz%2FH4%3D%0A&s=82d587e9b6aeced5cf9a7caefa91bf47fba809f3522b7379d22e45a2d5d35ebd>
this
seems easy to do. Looking at the arm arch variants, e.g.,

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/arch/arm/mm/dma-mapping.c%23L1194&k=oIvRg1%2BdGAgOoM1BIlLLqw%3D%3D%0A&r=l5Ago9ekmVFZ3c4M6eauqrJWGwjf6fTb%2BP3CxbBFkVM%3D%0A&m=QQSN6uVpEiw6RuWLAfK%2FKWBFV5HspJUfDh4Y2mUz%2FH4%3D%0A&s=4c178257eab9b5d7ca650dedba76cf27abeb49ddc7aebb9433f52b6c8bb3bbac


and

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/arch/arm64/mm/dma-mapping.c%23L44&k=oIvRg1%2BdGAgOoM1BIlLLqw%3D%3D%0A&r=l5Ago9ekmVFZ3c4M6eauqrJWGwjf6fTb%2BP3CxbBFkVM%3D%0A&m=QQSN6uVpEiw6RuWLAfK%2FKWBFV5HspJUfDh4Y2mUz%2FH4%3D%0A&s=5f62f4cbe8cee1f1dd4cbba656354efe6867bcdc664cf90e9719e2f42a85de08


i'm not sure if it is that easily done, as there aren't any fallbacks
for such a case and the code looks to me as if that's at least
somewhat intentional.

As far as TTM goes, one quick one-line fix to prevent it from using
the CMA at least on SWIOTLB, NOMMU and Intel IOMMU (when using the
above methods) would be to clear the __GFP_WAIT
<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=http://lxr.free-electrons.com/ident?i%3D__GFP_WAIT&k=oIvRg1%2BdGAgOoM1BIlLLqw%3D%3D%0A&r=l5Ago9ekmVFZ3c4M6eauqrJWGwjf6fTb%2BP3CxbBFkVM%3D%0A&m=QQSN6uVpEiw6RuWLAfK%2FKWBFV5HspJUfDh4Y2mUz%2FH4%3D%0A&s=d56d076770d3416264be6c9ea2829ac0d6951203696fa3ad04144f13307577bc>
flag from the
passed gfp_t flags. That would trigger the well working fallback.
So, is

__GFP_WAIT
<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=http://lxr.free-electrons.com/ident?i%3D__GFP_WAIT&k=oIvRg1%2BdGAgOoM1BIlLLqw%3D%3D%0A&r=l5Ago9ekmVFZ3c4M6eauqrJWGwjf6fTb%2BP3CxbBFkVM%3D%0A&m=QQSN6uVpEiw6RuWLAfK%2FKWBFV5HspJUfDh4Y2mUz%2FH4%3D%0A&s=d56d076770d3416264be6c9ea2829ac0d6951203696fa3ad04144f13307577bc>
needed
for those single page allocations that go through__ttm_dma_alloc_page
<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=http://lxr.free-electrons.com/ident?i%3D__ttm_dma_alloc_page&k=oIvRg1%2BdGAgOoM1BIlLLqw%3D%3D%0A&r=l5Ago9ekmVFZ3c4M6eauqrJWGwjf6fTb%2BP3CxbBFkVM%3D%0A&m=QQSN6uVpEiw6RuWLAfK%2FKWBFV5HspJUfDh4Y2mUz%2FH4%3D%0A&s=7898522bba274e4dcc332735fbcf0c96e48918f60c2ee8e9a3e9c73ab3487bd0>?


It would be nice to have such a simple, non-intrusive one-line patch
that we still could get into 3.17 and then backported to older stable
kernels to avoid the same desktop hangs there if CMA is enabled. It
would be also nice for actual users of CMA to not use up lots of CMA
space for gpu's which don't need it. I think DMA_CMA was introduced
around 3.12.

I don't think that's a good idea. Omitting __GFP_WAIT would cause
unnecessary memory allocation errors on systems under stress.
I think this should be filed as a DMA subsystem kernel bug / regression
and an appropriate solution should be worked out together with the DMA
subsystem maintainers and then backported.
Ok, so it is needed. I'll file a bug report.

The other problem is that probably TTM does not reuse pages from the
DMA pool. If i trace the __ttm_dma_alloc_page
<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=http://lxr.free-electrons.com/ident?i%3D__ttm_dma_alloc_page&k=oIvRg1%2BdGAgOoM1BIlLLqw%3D%3D%0A&r=l5Ago9ekmVFZ3c4M6eauqrJWGwjf6fTb%2BP3CxbBFkVM%3D%0A&m=QQSN6uVpEiw6RuWLAfK%2FKWBFV5HspJUfDh4Y2mUz%2FH4%3D%0A&s=7898522bba274e4dcc332735fbcf0c96e48918f60c2ee8e9a3e9c73ab3487bd0>
and
__ttm_dma_free_page
<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=http://lxr.free-electrons.com/ident?i%3D__ttm_dma_alloc_page&k=oIvRg1%2BdGAgOoM1BIlLLqw%3D%3D%0A&r=l5Ago9ekmVFZ3c4M6eauqrJWGwjf6fTb%2BP3CxbBFkVM%3D%0A&m=QQSN6uVpEiw6RuWLAfK%2FKWBFV5HspJUfDh4Y2mUz%2FH4%3D%0A&s=7898522bba274e4dcc332735fbcf0c96e48918f60c2ee8e9a3e9c73ab3487bd0>
calls for
those single page allocs/frees, then over a 20 second interval of
tracing and switching tabs in firefox, scrolling things around etc. i
find about as many alloc's as i find free's, e.g., 1607 allocs vs.
1648 frees.
This is because historically the pools have been designed to keep only
pages with nonstandard caching attributes since changing page caching
attributes have been very slow but the kernel page allocators have been
reasonably fast.

/Thomas
Ok. A bit more ftraceing showed my hang problem case goes through the
"if (is_cached)" paths, so the pool doesn't recycle anything and i see
it bouncing up and down by 4 pages all the time.

But for the non-cached case, which i don't hit with my problem, could
one of you look at line 954...

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/drivers/gpu/drm/ttm/ttm_page_alloc_dma.c%23L954&k=oIvRg1%2BdGAgOoM1BIlLLqw%3D%3D%0A&r=l5Ago9ekmVFZ3c4M6eauqrJWGwjf6fTb%2BP3CxbBFkVM%3D%0A&m=QQSN6uVpEiw6RuWLAfK%2FKWBFV5HspJUfDh4Y2mUz%2FH4%3D%0A&s=e15c51805d429ee6d8960d6b88035e9811a1cdbfbf13168eec2fbb2214b99c60


... and tell me why that unconditional npages = count; assignment
makes sense? It seems to essentially disable all recycling for the dma
pool whenever the pool isn't filled up to/beyond its maximum with free
pages? When the pool is filled up, lots of stuff is recycled, but when
it is already somewhat below capacity, it gets "punished" by not
getting refilled? I'd just like to understand the logic behind that line.

thanks,
-mario
I'll happily forward that question to Konrad who wrote the code (or it
may even stem from the ordinary page pool code which IIRC has Dave
Airlie / Jerome Glisse as authors)
This is effectively bogus code, i now wonder how it came to stay alive.
Attached patch will fix that.

Yes, that makes sense to me. Fwiw,

Reviewed-by: Mario Kleiner <mario.kleiner.de@xxxxxxxxx>

-mario

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