Re: AMD graphics performance regression in 4.15 and later

From: Christian KÃnig
Date: Mon Apr 09 2018 - 05:42:31 EST


Am 07.04.2018 um 00:00 schrieb Jean-Marc Valin:
Hi Christian,

Thanks for the info. FYI, I've also opened a Firefox bug for that at:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1448778
Feel free to comment since you have a better understanding of what's
going on.

One last question: right now I'm running 4.15.0 with the "offending"
patch reverted. Is that safe to run or are there possible bad
interactions with other changes.

That should work without problems.

But I just had another idea as well, if you want you could still test the new code path which will be using in 4.17.

Backporting all the detection logic is to invasive, but you could just go into drivers/gpu/drm/amd/amdgpu/amdgpu_ttm.c and forcefull use the other code path.

Just look out for "#ifdef CONFIG_SWIOTLB" checks and disable those.

Regards,
Christian.


Cheers,

Jean-Marc

On 04/06/2018 01:20 PM, Christian KÃnig wrote:
Am 06.04.2018 um 18:42 schrieb Jean-Marc Valin:
Hi Christian,

On 04/09/2018 07:48 AM, Christian KÃnig wrote:
Am 06.04.2018 um 17:30 schrieb Jean-Marc Valin:
Hi Christian,

Is there a way to turn off these huge pages at boot-time/run-time?
Only at compile time by not setting CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE.
Any reason why
echo never > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled
doesn't solve the problem?
Because we unfortunately try to allocate huge pages anyway, we
unfortunately just fail in 100% of all cases.

That basically gives you both, the extra allocation overhead and the
still bad throughput.

Also, I assume that disabling CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE will disable
them for everything and not just what your patch added, right?
Correct, that's why I wrote that disabling SWIOTLBs might be better.

I'm not sure what you mean by "We mitigated the problem by avoiding the
slow coherent DMA code path on almost all platforms on newer
kernels". I
tested up to 4.16 and the performance regression is just as bad as
it is
for 4.15.
Indeed 4.16 still doesn't have that. You could use the
amd-staging-drm-next branch or wait for 4.17.
Is there a way to pull just that change or is there too much
interactions with other changes?
It adds a new detection if memory allocation needs to be coherent or
not, that is not something you can easily pull into older versions.

That isn't related to the GFX hardware, but to your CPU/motherboard and
whatever else you have in the system.
Well, I have an nvidia GPU in the same system (normally only used for
CUDA) and if I use it instead of my RX 560 then I'm not seeing any
performance issue with 4.15.
That's because you are probably using the Nvidia binary driver which has
a completely separate code base.

Some part of your system needs SWIOTLB and that makes allocating memory
much slower.
What would that part be? FTR, I have a complete description of my system
at https://jmvalin.dreamwidth.org/15583.html

I don't know if it's related, but I can maybe see one thing in common
between my machine and the Core 2 Quad from the other bug report and
that's the "NUMA part". I have a dual-socket Xeon and (AFAIK) the Core 2
Quad is made of two two-core CPUs glued together with little
communication between them.
Yeah, that is probably the reason.

Intel doesn't use TTM because they don't have dedicated VRAM, but the
open source nvidia driver should be affected as well.
I'm using the proprietary nvidia driver (because CUDA). Is that supposed
to be affected as well?
No.

We already mitigated that problem and I don't see any solution which
will arrive faster than 4.17.
Is that supposed to make the slowdown unnoticeable or just slightly
better?
It completely goes away. The issue with the coherent path is that it
tries to always allocate the lowest possible memory to make sure that it
fits into the DMA constrains of all devices in the system.

But since AMD GPU can handle 40bits of addresses you would need at least
1TB of memory in the system to trigger that (or a NUMA where some system
is low and some in a high area).

Christian.

The only quick workaround I can see is to avoid firefox, chrome for
example is reported to work perfectly fine.
Or use an unaffected GPU/driver ;-)

Cheers,

ÂÂÂÂJean-Marc

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