Re: [RFC 01/11] drm/i915: Early exit from semaphore_waits_for for execlist mode.

Chris Wilson
2015-06-08T17:36:39Z

On Mon, Jun 08, 2015 at 06:03:19PM +0100, Tomas Elf wrote:
> When submitting semaphores in execlist mode the hang checker crashes in this
> function because it is only runnable in ring submission mode. The reason this
> is of particular interest to the TDR patch series is because we use semaphores
> as a mean to induce hangs during testing (which is the recommended way to
> induce hangs for gen8+). It's not clear how this is supposed to work in
> execlist mode since:
>
> 1. This function requires a ring buffer.
>
> 2. Retrieving a ring buffer in execlist mode requires us to retrieve the
> corresponding context, which we get from a request.
>
> 3. Retieving a request from the hang checker is not straight-forward since that
> requires us to grab the struct_mutex in order to synchronize against the
> request retirement thread.
>
> 4. Grabbing the struct_mutex from the hang checker is nothing that we will do
> since that puts us at risk of deadlock since a hung thread might be holding the
> struct_mutex already.
>
> Therefore it's not obvious how we're supposed to deal with this. For now, we're
> doing an early exit from this function, which avoids any kernel panic situation
> when running our own internal TDR ULT.
>
> Signed-off-by: Tomas Elf <tomas.elf@intel.com>
> ---
> drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_irq.c | 20 ++++++++++++++++++++
> 1 file changed, 20 insertions(+)
>
> diff --git a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_irq.c b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_irq.c
> index 46bcbff..40c44fc 100644
> --- a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_irq.c
> +++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_irq.c
> @@ -2698,6 +2698,26 @@ semaphore_waits_for(struct intel_engine_cs *ring, u32 *seqno)
> u64 offset = 0;
> int i, backwards;
>
> + /*
> + * This function does not support execlist mode - any attempt to
> + * proceed further into this function will result in a kernel panic
> + * when dereferencing ring->buffer, which is not set up in execlist
> + * mode.
> + *
> + * The correct way of doing it would be to derive the currently
> + * executing ring buffer from the current context, which is derived
> + * from the currently running request. Unfortunately, to get the
> + * current request we would have to grab the struct_mutex before doing
> + * anything else, which would be ill-advised since some other thread
> + * might have grabbed it already and managed to hang itself, causing
> + * the hang checker to deadlock.
> + *
> + * Therefore, this function does not support execlist mode in its
> + * current form. Just return NULL and move on.
> + */
> + if (i915.enable_execlists)
> + return NULL;

if (ring->buffer == NULL)
return NULL;

if (i915.enable_execlists) is a layering violation that needs to be
erradicated.
-Chris

--
Chris Wilson, Intel Open Source Technology Centre