Re: [Linaro-mm-sig] Re: [PATCH RFC 18/18] drm/asahi: Add the Asahi driver for Apple AGX GPUs

Daniel Vetter
2023-04-06T10:42:43Z

On Thu, Apr 06, 2023 at 01:44:22PM +0900, Asahi Lina wrote:
> On 05/04/2023 23.37, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 07, 2023 at 11:25:43PM +0900, Asahi Lina wrote:
> > > +/// A generic monotonically incrementing ID used to uniquely identify object instances within the
> > > +/// driver.
> > > +pub(crate) struct ID(AtomicU64);
> > > +
> > > +impl ID {
> > > + /// Create a new ID counter with a given value.
> > > + fn new(val: u64) -> ID {
> > > + ID(AtomicU64::new(val))
> > > + }
> > > +
> > > + /// Fetch the next unique ID.
> > > + pub(crate) fn next(&self) -> u64 {
> > > + self.0.fetch_add(1, Ordering::Relaxed)
> > > + }
> > > +}
> >
> > Continuing the theme of me commenting on individual things, I stumbled
> > over this because I noticed that there's a lot of id based lookups where I
> > don't expect them, and started chasing.
> >
> > - For ids use xarray, not atomic counters. Yes I know dma_fence timelines
> > gets this wrong, this goes back to an innocent time where we didn't
> > allocate more than one timeline per engine, and no one fixed it since
> > then. Yes u64 should be big enough for everyone :-/
> >
> > - Attaching ID spaces to drm_device is also not great. drm is full of
> > these mistakes. Much better if their per drm_file and so private to each
> > client.
> >
> > - They shouldn't be used for anything else than uapi id -> kernel object
> > lookup at the beginning of ioctl code, and nowhere else. At least from
> > skimming it seems like these are used all over the driver codebase,
> > which does freak me out. At least on the C side that's a clear indicator
> > for a refcount/lockin/data structure model that's not thought out at
> > all.
> >
> > What's going on here, what do I miss?
>
> These aren't UAPI IDs, they are driver-internal IDs (the UAPI IDs do use
> xarray and are per-File). Most of them are just for debugging, so that when
> I enable full debug spam I have some way to correlate different things that
> are happening together (this subset of interleaved log lines relate to the
> same submission). Basically just object names that are easier to read (and
> less of a security leak) than pointers and guaranteed not to repeat. You
> could get rid of most of them and it wouldn't affect the driver design, it
> just makes it very hard to see what's going on with debug logs ^^;

Hm generally we just print the kernel addresses with the right printk
modifiers. Those filter/hash addresses if you have the right paranoia
settings enabled. I guess throwing in a debug id doesn't hurt, but would
be good to make that a lot more clearer.

I haven't read the full driver yet because I'm still too much lost, that's
why I guess I missed the xarray stuff on the file. I'll try and go
understand that.

For the big topic below I need to think more.
-Daniel

> There are only two that are ever used for non-debugging purposes: the VM ID,
> and the File ID. Both are per-device global IDs attached to the VMs (not the
> UAPI VM objects, but rather the underlyng MMU address space managers they
> represent, including the kernel-internal ones) and to Files themselves. They
> are used for destroying GEM objects: since the objects are also
> device-global across multiple clients, I need a way to do things like "clean
> up all mappings for this File" or "clean up all mappings for this VM".
> There's an annoying circular reference between GEM objects and their
> mappings, which is why this is explicitly coded out in destroy paths instead
> of naturally happening via Drop semantics (without that cleanup code, the
> circular reference leaks it).
>
> So e.g. when a File does a GEM close or explicitly asks for all mappings of
> an object to be removed, it goes out to the (possibly shared) GEM object and
> tells it to drop all mappings marked as owned by that unique File ID. When
> an explicit "unmap all in VM" op happens, it asks the GEM object to drop all
> mappings for that underlying VM ID. Similarly, when a UAPI VM object is
> dropped (in the Drop impl, so both explicitly and when the whole File/xarray
> is dropped and such), that does an explicit unmap of a special dummy object
> it owns which would otherwise leak since it is not tracked as a GEM object
> owned by that File and therefore not handled by GEM closing. And again along
> the same lines, the allocators in alloc.rs explicitly destroy the mappings
> for their backing GEM objects on Drop. All this is due to that annoying
> circular reference between VMs and GEM objects that I'm not sure how to fix.
>
> Note that if I *don't* do this (or forget to do it somewhere) the
> consequence is just that we leak memory, and if you try to destroy the wrong
> IDs somehow the worst that can happen is you unmap things you shouldn't and
> fault the GPU (or, in the kernel or kernel-managed user VM cases,
> potentially the firmware). Rust safety guarantees still keep things from
> going entirely off the rails within the kernel, since everything that
> matters is reference counted (which is why these reference cycles are
> possible at all).
>
> This all started when I was looking at the panfrost driver for reference. It
> does the same thing except it uses actual pointers to the owning entities
> instead of IDs, and pointer comparison (see panfrost_gem_close). Of course
> you could try do that in Rust too (literally storing and comparing raw
> pointers that aren't owned references), but then you're introducing a Pin<>
> requirement on those objects to make their addresses stable and it feels way
> more icky and error-prone than unique IDs (since addresses can be reused).
> panfrost only has a single mmu (what I call the raw VM) per File while I
> have an arbitrary number, which is why I end up with the extra
> distinction/complexity of both File and VM IDs, but the concept is the same.
>
> Some of this is going to be refactored when I implement arbitrary VM range
> mapping/unmapping, which would be a good time to improve this... but is
> there something particularly wrong/broken about the way I'm doing it now
> that I missed? I figured unique u64 IDs would be a pretty safe way to
> identify entities and cleanup the mappings when needed.
>
> ~~ Lina
>
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--
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation