Re: [PATCH 2/2] media: usb: pwc: Don't use coherent DMA buffers for ISO transfer

Matwey V. Kornilov
2018-07-18T12:48:34Z

2018-07-17 23:10 GMT+03:00 Ezequiel Garcia <ezequiel@collabora.com>:
> Hi Matwey,
>
> First of all, sorry for the delay.
>
> Adding Alan and Hans. Guys, do you have any feedback here?
>
> See below for some feedback on my side.
>
> On Mon, 2018-06-18 at 10:10 +0300, Matwey V. Kornilov wrote:
>> Hi Ezequiel,
>>
>> 2018-06-18 8:11 GMT+03:00 Ezequiel Garcia <ezequiel@collabora.com>:
>> > + Laurent
>> >
>> > On Sun, 2018-06-17 at 17:36 +0300, Matwey V. Kornilov wrote:
>> > > DMA cocherency slows the transfer down on systems without hardware
>> > > coherent DMA.
>> > >
>> > > Based on previous commit the following performance benchmarks have been
>> > > carried out. Average memcpy() data transfer rate (rate) and handler
>> > > completion time (time) have been measured when running video stream at
>> > > 640x480 resolution at 10fps.
>> > >
>> > > x86_64 based system (Intel Core i5-3470). This platform has hardware
>> > > coherent DMA support and proposed change doesn't make big difference here.
>> > >
>> > > * kmalloc: rate = (4.4 +- 1.0) GBps
>> > > time = (2.4 +- 1.2) usec
>> > > * usb_alloc_coherent: rate = (4.1 +- 0.9) GBps
>> > > time = (2.5 +- 1.0) usec
>> > >
>> > > We see that the measurements agree well within error ranges in this case.
>> > > So no performance downgrade is introduced.
>> > >
>> > > armv7l based system (TI AM335x BeagleBone Black). This platform has no
>> > > hardware coherent DMA support. DMA coherence is implemented via disabled
>> > > page caching that slows down memcpy() due to memory controller behaviour.
>> > >
>> > > * kmalloc: rate = (190 +- 30) MBps
>> > > time = (50 +- 10) usec
>> > > * usb_alloc_coherent: rate = (33 +- 4) MBps
>> > > time = (3000 +- 400) usec
>> > >
>> > > Note, that quantative difference leads (this commit leads to 5 times
>> > > acceleration) to qualitative behavior change in this case. As it was
>> > > stated before, the video stream can not be successfully received at AM335x
>> > > platforms with MUSB based USB host controller due to performance issues
>> > > [1].
>> > >
>> > > [1] https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-usb/msg165735.html
>> > >
>> >
>> > This is quite interesting! I have receive similar complaints
>> > from users wanting to use stk1160 on BBB and Raspberrys,
>> > without much luck on either, due to insufficient isoc bandwidth.
>> >
>> > I'm guessing other ARM platforms could be suffering
>> > from the same issue.
>> >
>> > Note that stk1160 and uvcvideo drivers use kmalloc on platforms
>> > where DMA_NONCOHERENT is defined, but this is not the case
>> > on ARM platforms.
>>
>> There are some ARMv7 platforms that have coherent DMA (for instance
>> Broadcome Horthstar Plus series), but the most of them don't have. It
>> is defined in device tree file, and there is no way to recover this
>> information at runtime in USB perepherial driver.
>>
>> >
>> > So, what is the benefit of using consistent
>> > for these URBs, as opposed to streaming?
>>
>> I don't know, I think there is no real benefit and all we see is a
>> consequence of copy-pasta when some webcam drivers were inspired by
>> others and development priparily was going at x86 platforms.
>
> You are probably right about the copy-pasta.
>
>> It would
>> be great if somebody corrected me here. DMA Coherence is quite strong
>> property and I cannot figure out how can it help when streaming video.
>> The CPU host always reads from the buffer and never writes to.
>> Hardware perepherial always writes to and never reads from. Moreover,
>> buffer access is mutually exclusive and separated in time by Interrupt
>> fireing and URB starting (when we reuse existing URB for new request).
>> Only single one memory barrier is really required here.
>>
>
> Yeah, and not setting URB_NO_TRANSFER_DMA_MAP makes the USB core
> create DMA mappings and use the streaming API. Which makes more
> sense in hardware without hardware coherency.
>
> The only thing that bothers me with this patch is that it's not
> really something specific to this driver. If this fix is valid
> for pwc, then it's valid for all the drivers allocating coherent
> memory.
>
> And also, this path won't prevent further copy-paste spread
> of the coherent allocation.
>
> Is there any chance we can introduce a helper to allocate
> isoc URBs, and then change all drivers to use it? No need
> to do all of them now, but it would be good to at least have
> a plan for it.

Well, basically I am agree with you.
However, I don't have all possible hardware to test, so I can't fix
all possible drivers.
Also I can not figure out how could the helper looked like. What do
you think about usb_alloc() (c.f. usb_alloc_coherent()) ?

>
> Chances are, only a handful of platforms would care to use
> coherent mappings.
>
>> I understand that there are cases when DMA coherence is really needed,
>> for instane VirtIO VRing when we accessing same data structure in both
>> directions from the both sides, but this has nothing common with our
>> case.
>>
>> >
>> > If the choice is simply platform dependent,
>> > can't we somehow detect which mapping should
>> > be prefered?
>>
>> Now, we don't have this way.
>>
>> >
>> > > Signed-off-by: Matwey V. Kornilov <matwey@sai.msu.ru>
>> > > ---
>> > > drivers/media/usb/pwc/pwc-if.c | 12 +++---------
>> > > 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)
>> > >
>> > > diff --git a/drivers/media/usb/pwc/pwc-if.c b/drivers/media/usb/pwc/pwc-if.c
>> > > index 5775d1f60668..6a3cd9680a7f 100644
>> > > --- a/drivers/media/usb/pwc/pwc-if.c
>> > > +++ b/drivers/media/usb/pwc/pwc-if.c
>> > > @@ -427,11 +427,8 @@ static int pwc_isoc_init(struct pwc_device *pdev)
>> > > urb->interval = 1; // devik
>> > > urb->dev = udev;
>> > > urb->pipe = usb_rcvisocpipe(udev, pdev->vendpoint);
>> > > - urb->transfer_flags = URB_ISO_ASAP | URB_NO_TRANSFER_DMA_MAP;
>> > > - urb->transfer_buffer = usb_alloc_coherent(udev,
>> > > - ISO_BUFFER_SIZE,
>> > > - GFP_KERNEL,
>> > > - &urb->transfer_dma);
>> > > + urb->transfer_flags = URB_ISO_ASAP;
>> > > + urb->transfer_buffer = kmalloc(ISO_BUFFER_SIZE, GFP_KERNEL);
>> > > if (urb->transfer_buffer == NULL) {
>> > > PWC_ERROR("Failed to allocate urb buffer %d\n", i);
>> > > pwc_isoc_cleanup(pdev);
>> > > @@ -491,10 +488,7 @@ static void pwc_iso_free(struct pwc_device *pdev)
>> > > if (pdev->urbs[i]) {
>> > > PWC_DEBUG_MEMORY("Freeing URB\n");
>> > > if (pdev->urbs[i]->transfer_buffer) {
>> > > - usb_free_coherent(pdev->udev,
>> > > - pdev->urbs[i]->transfer_buffer_length,
>> > > - pdev->urbs[i]->transfer_buffer,
>> > > - pdev->urbs[i]->transfer_dma);
>> > > + kfree(pdev->urbs[i]->transfer_buffer);
>> > > }
>> > > usb_free_urb(pdev->urbs[i]);
>> > > pdev->urbs[i] = NULL;
>>
>>
>>
>

--
With best regards,
Matwey V. Kornilov.
Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia
119234, Moscow, Universitetsky pr-k 13, +7 (495) 9392382