Re: [TuxOnIce-devel] [RFC] TuxOnIce

[Nigel Cunningham <nigel@tuxonice.net>]

Hi.

On Thu, 2009-05-07 at 16:14 -0700, Jesse Barnes wrote:
> On Fri, 08 May 2009 06:41:00 +1000
> Nigel Cunningham <nigel@tuxonice.net> wrote:
> 
> > Hi.
> > 
> > On Thu, 2009-05-07 at 21:27 +0200, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > > In fact I agree, but there's a catch.  The way in which TuxOnIce
> > > operates LRU pages is based on some assumptions that may or may not
> > > be satisfied in future, so if we decide to merge it, then we'll
> > > have to make sure these assumptions will be satisfied.  That in
> > > turn is going to require quite some discussion I guess.
> > 
> > Agreed. That's why I've got that GEMS patch - it's putting pages on
> > the LRU that don't satisfy the former assumptions: they are used
> > during hibernating and need to be atomically copied. If there are
> > further developments in that area, I would hope we could just extend
> > what's been done with GEMS.
> 
> Another option here would be to suspend all DRM operations earlier.
> The suspend hook for i915 already does this, but maybe it needs to
> happen sooner?  We'll probably want a generic DRM suspend hook soon too
> (as the radeon memory manager lands) to shut down GPU activity in the
> suspend and hibernate cases.
> 
> All that assumes I understand what's going on here though. :)  It
> appears you delay saving the GEM (just GEM by the way, for Graphics/GPU
> Execution Manager) backing store until late to avoid having the pages
> move around out from under you?

Yeah. TuxOnIce saves some pages without doing an atomic copy of them. Up
'til now, the algorithm has been LRU pages - pages used for TuxOnIce's
userspace helpers. With GEM, we also need to make sure GEM pages are
atomically copied and so also 'subtract' them from the list of pages
that aren't atomically copied.

It's no great problem to do this, so I wouldn't ask you to change GEM to
suspend DRM operations earlier. It's more important that GEM doesn't
allocate extra pages unexpectedly - and I don't think that's likely
anyway since we've switched away from X. This is important because
TuxOnIce depends (for reliability) on having memory usage being
predictable much more than swsusp and uswsusp do. (Larger images, less
free RAM to begin with).

Regards,

Nigel