Re: drm_sched run_job and scheduling latency

Matthew Brost
2026-03-05T09:10:14Z

On Thu, Mar 05, 2026 at 09:38:16AM +0100, Philipp Stanner wrote:
> On Thu, 2026-03-05 at 09:27 +0100, Boris Brezillon wrote:
> > Hi Matthew,
> >
> > On Wed, 4 Mar 2026 18:04:25 -0800
> > Matthew Brost <matthew.brost@intel.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On Wed, Mar 04, 2026 at 02:51:39PM -0800, Chia-I Wu wrote:
> > > > Hi,
> > > >
> > > > Our system compositor (surfaceflinger on android) submits gpu jobs
> > > > from a SCHED_FIFO thread to an RT gpu queue. However, because
> > > > workqueue threads are SCHED_NORMAL, the scheduling latency from submit
> > > > to run_job can sometimes cause frame misses. We are seeing this on
> > > > panthor and xe, but the issue should be common to all drm_sched users.
> > > >
> > >
> > > I'm going to assume that since this is a compositor, you do not pass
> > > input dependencies to the page-flip job. Is that correct?
> > >
> > > If so, I believe we could fairly easily build an opt-in DRM sched path
> > > that directly calls run_job in the exec IOCTL context (I assume this is
> > > SCHED_FIFO) if the job has no dependencies.
> >
> > I guess by ::run_job() you mean something slightly more involved that
> > checks if:
> >
> > - other jobs are pending

Yes.

> > - enough credits (AKA ringbuf space) is available

Yes.

> > - and probably other stuff I forgot about

The scheduler is not stopped; serialize the bypass path with scheduler
stop/start.

> >
> > >
> > > This would likely break some of Xe’s submission-backend assumptions
> > > around mutual exclusion and ordering based on the workqueue, but that
> > > seems workable. I don’t know how the Panthor code is structured or
> > > whether they have similar issues.
> >
> > Honestly, I'm not thrilled by this fast-path/call-run_job-directly idea
> > you're describing. There's just so many things we can forget that would
> > lead to races/ordering issues that will end up being hard to trigger and
> > debug.
> >
>
> +1
>
> I'm not thrilled either. More like the opposite of thrilled actually.
>
> Even if we could get that to work. This is more of a maintainability
> issue.
>
> The scheduler is full of insane performance hacks for this or that
> driver. Lockless accesses, a special lockless queue only used by that
> one party in the kernel (a lockless queue which is nowadays, after N
> reworks, being used with a lock. Ah well).
>

This is not relevant to this discussion—see below. In general, I agree
that the lockless tricks in the scheduler are not great, nor is the fact
that the scheduler became a dumping ground for driver-specific features.
But again, that is not what we’re talking about here—see below.

> In the past discussions Danilo and I made it clear that more major
> features in _new_ patch series aimed at getting merged into drm/sched
> must be preceded by cleanup work to address some of the scheduler's
> major problems.

Ah, we've moved to dictatorship quickly. Noted.

>

I can't say I agree with either of you here.

In about an hour, I seemingly have a bypass path working in DRM sched +
Xe, and my diff is:

108 insertions(+), 31 deletions(-)

About 40 lines of the insertions are kernel-doc, so I'm not buying that
this is a maintenance issue or a major feature - it is literally a
single new function.

I understand a bypass path can create issues—for example, on certain
queues in Xe I definitely can't use the bypass path, so Xe simply
wouldn’t use it in those cases. This is the driver's choice to use or
not. If a driver doesn't know how to use the scheduler, well, that’s on
the driver. Providing a simple, documented function as a fast path
really isn't some crazy idea.

The alternative—asking for RT workqueues or changing the design to use
kthread_worker—actually is.

> That's especially true if it's features aimed at performance buffs.
>

With the above mindset, I'm actually very confused why this series [1]
would even be considered as this order of magnitude greater in
complexity than my suggestion here.

Matt

[1] https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/series/159025/

>
>
> P.