drm/i915/gem: Make context persistence optional

Our existing behaviour is to allow contexts and their GPU requests to
persist past the point of closure until the requests are complete. This
allows clients to operate in a 'fire-and-forget' manner where they can
setup a rendering pipeline and hand it over to the display server and
immediately exit. As the rendering pipeline is kept alive until
completion, the display server (or other consumer) can use the results
in the future and present them to the user.

The compute model is a little different. They have little to no buffer
sharing between processes as their kernels tend to operate on a
continuous stream, feeding the results back to the client application.
These kernels operate for an indeterminate length of time, with many
clients wishing that the kernel was always running for as long as they
keep feeding in the data, i.e. acting like a DSP.

Not all clients want this persistent "desktop" behaviour and would prefer
that the contexts are cleaned up immediately upon closure. This ensures
that when clients are run without hangchecking (e.g. for compute kernels
of indeterminate runtime), any GPU hang or other unexpected workloads
are terminated with the process and does not continue to hog resources.

The default behaviour for new contexts is the legacy persistence mode,
as some desktop applications are dependent upon the existing behaviour.
New clients will have to opt in to immediate cleanup on context
closure. If the hangchecking modparam is disabled, so is persistent
context support -- all contexts will be terminated on closure.

We expect this behaviour change to be welcomed by compute users, who
have often been caught between a rock and a hard place. They disable
hangchecking to avoid their kernels being "unfairly" declared hung, but
have also experienced true hangs that the system was then unable to
clean up. Naturally, this leads to bug reports.

Testcase: igt/gem_ctx_persistence
Link: https://github.com/intel/compute-runtime/pull/228
Signed-off-by: Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>
Cc: Joonas Lahtinen <joonas.lahtinen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Michał Winiarski <michal.winiarski@intel.com>
Cc: Jon Bloomfield <jon.bloomfield@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Jon Bloomfield <jon.bloomfield@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Tvrtko Ursulin <tvrtko.ursulin@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Joonas Lahtinen <joonas.lahtinen@linux.intel.com>
Acked-by: Jason Ekstrand <jason@jlekstrand.net>
Link: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/msgid/20191029202338.8841-1-chris@chris-wilson.co.uk

1 files changed, 15 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/uapi/drm/i915_drm.h b/include/uapi/drm/i915_drm.h
index 63d40cba97e0..5400d7e057f1 100644
--- a/include/uapi/drm/i915_drm.h
+++ b/include/uapi/drm/i915_drm.h
@@ -1572,6 +1572,21 @@ struct drm_i915_gem_context_param {
  *   i915_context_engines_bond (I915_CONTEXT_ENGINES_EXT_BOND)
  */
 #define I915_CONTEXT_PARAM_ENGINES	0xa
+
+/*
+ * I915_CONTEXT_PARAM_PERSISTENCE:
+ *
+ * Allow the context and active rendering to survive the process until
+ * completion. Persistence allows fire-and-forget clients to queue up a
+ * bunch of work, hand the output over to a display server and then quit.
+ * If the context is marked as not persistent, upon closing (either via
+ * an explicit DRM_I915_GEM_CONTEXT_DESTROY or implicitly from file closure
+ * or process termination), the context and any outstanding requests will be
+ * cancelled (and exported fences for cancelled requests marked as -EIO).
+ *
+ * By default, new contexts allow persistence.
+ */
+#define I915_CONTEXT_PARAM_PERSISTENCE	0xb
 /* Must be kept compact -- no holes and well documented */
 
 	__u64 value;