If we encounter a situation where the CPU blocks waiting for results
from the GPU, give the GPU a kick to boost its the frequency.
This should work to reduce user interface stalls and to quickly promote
mesa to high frequencies - but the cost is that our requested frequency
stalls high (as we do not idle for long enough before rc6 to start
reducing frequencies, nor are we aggressive at down clocking an
underused GPU). However, this should be mitigated by rc6 itself powering
off the GPU when idle, and that energy use is dependent upon the workload
of the GPU in addition to its frequency (e.g. the math or sampler
functions only consume power when used). Still, this is likely to
adversely affect light workloads.
In particular, this nearly eliminates the highly noticeable wake-up lag
in animations from idle. For example, expose or workspace transitions.
(However, given the situation where we fail to downclock, our requested
frequency is almost always the maximum, except for Baytrail where we
manually downclock upon idling. This often masks the latency of
upclocking after being idle, so animations are typically smooth - at the
cost of increased power consumption.)
Stéphane raised the concern that this will punish good applications and
reward bad applications - but due to the nature of how mesa performs its
client throttling, I believe all mesa applications will be roughly
equally affected. To address this concern, and to prevent applications
like compositors from permanently boosting the RPS state, we ratelimit the
frequency of the wait-boosts each client recieves.
Unfortunately, this techinique is ineffective with Ironlake - which also
has dynamic render power states and suffers just as dramatically. For
Ironlake, the thermal/power headroom is shared with the CPU through
Intelligent Power Sharing and the intel-ips module. This leaves us with
no GPU boost frequencies available when coming out of idle, and due to
hardware limitations we cannot change the arbitration between the CPU and
GPU quickly enough to be effective.
v2: Limit each client to receiving a single boost for each active period.
Tested by QA to only marginally increase power, and to demonstrably
increase throughput in games. No latency measurements yet.
v3: Cater for front-buffer rendering with manual throttling.
v4: Tidy up.
v5: Sadly the compositor needs frequent boosts as it may never idle, but
due to its picking mechanism (using ReadPixels) may require frequent
waits. Those waits, along with the waits for the vrefresh swap, conspire
to keep the GPU at low frequencies despite the interactive latency. To
overcome this we ditch the one-boost-per-active-period and just ratelimit
the number of wait-boosts each client can receive.
Reported-and-tested-by: Paul Neumann <paul104x@yahoo.de>
Bugzilla: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68716
Signed-off-by: Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>
Cc: Kenneth Graunke <kenneth@whitecape.org>
Cc: Stéphane Marchesin <stephane.marchesin@gmail.com>
Cc: Owen Taylor <otaylor@redhat.com>
Cc: "Meng, Mengmeng" <mengmeng.meng@intel.com>
Cc: "Zhuang, Lena" <lena.zhuang@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@virtuousgeek.org>
[danvet: No extern for function prototypes in headers.]
Signed-off-by: Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch>
b29c19b645