[PATCH] drm/i915: Allow normal clients to always preempt idle priority clients

[Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>]

When first enabling preemption, we hesitated from making it a free-for-all
where every higher priority client would force a preempt-to-idle cycle
and take over from all lower priority clients. We hesitated because we
were uncertain just how well preemption would work in practice, whether
the preemption latency itself would detract from the latency gains for
higher priority tasks and whether it would work at all. Since
introducing preemption, we have been enabling it for more common tasks,
even giving normal clients a small preemptive boost when they first
start (to aide fairness and improve interactivity). Now lets take one
step further and give permission for all normal (priority:0) clients to
preempt any idle (priority:<0) task so that users running long compute
jobs do not overly impact other jobs (i.e. their desktop) and the system
remains responsive under such idle loads.

References: f6322eddaff7 ("drm/i915/preemption: Allow preemption between submission ports")
References: b16c765122f9 ("drm/i915: Priority boost for new clients")
Signed-off-by: Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>
Cc: Tvrtko Ursulin <tvrtko.ursulin@intel.com>
Cc: Michal Wajdeczko <michal.wajdeczko@intel.com>
Cc: Michał Winiarski <michal.winiarski@intel.com>
Cc: "Bloomfield, Jon" <jon.bloomfield@intel.com>
---
 drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_ringbuffer.h | 15 ++++++++++++++-
 1 file changed, 14 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_ringbuffer.h b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_ringbuffer.h
index 34d0a148e664..983ad1e7914d 100644
--- a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_ringbuffer.h
+++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_ringbuffer.h
@@ -592,7 +592,20 @@ intel_engine_has_preemption(const struct intel_engine_cs *engine)
 
 static inline bool __execlists_need_preempt(int prio, int last)
 {
-	return prio > max(0, last);
+	/*
+	 * Allow preemption of low -> normal -> high, but we do
+	 * not allow low priority tasks to preempt other low priority
+	 * tasks under the impression that latency for low priority
+	 * tasks does not matter (as much as background throughput),
+	 * so kiss.
+	 *
+	 * More naturally we would write
+	 * 	prio >= max(0, last);
+	 * except that we wish to prevent triggering preemption at the same
+	 * priority level: the task that is running should remain running
+	 * to preserve FIFO ordering of dependencies.
+	 */
+	return prio > max(I915_PRIORITY_NORMAL - 1, last);
 }
 
 static inline void
-- 
2.20.1

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