Hi,
Since Christian believes that we can't deadlock the kernel with some changes there, we just need to make everything nice for userspace too. Instead of explaining how it will work, I will explain the cases where future hardware (and its kernel driver) will break existing userspace in order to protect everybody from deadlocks. Anything that uses implicit sync will be spared, so X and Wayland will be fine, assuming they don't import/export fences. Those use cases that do import/export fences might or might not work, depending on how the fences are used.
One of the necessities is that all fences will become future fences. The semantics of imported/exported fences will change completely and will have new restrictions on the usage. The restrictions are:
1) Android sync files will be impossible to support, so won't be supported. (they don't allow future fences)
2) Implicit sync and explicit sync will be mutually exclusive between process. A process can either use one or the other, but not both. This is meant to prevent a deadlock condition with future fences where any process can malevolently deadlock execution of any other process, even execution of a higher-privileged process. The kernel will impose the following restrictions to protect against the deadlock:
a) a process with an implicitly-sync'd imported/exported buffer can't import/export a fence from/to another process b) a process with an imported/exported fence can't import/export an implicitly-sync'd buffer from/to another process
Alternative: A higher-privileged process could enforce both restrictions instead of the kernel to protect itself from the deadlock, but this would be a can of worms for existing userspace. It would be better if the kernel just broke unsafe userspace on future hw, just like sync files.
If both implicit and explicit sync are allowed to occur simultaneously, sending a future fence that will never signal to any process will deadlock that process after it acquires the implicit sync lock, which is a sequence number that the process is required to write to memory and send an interrupt from the GPU in a finite time. This is how the deadlock can happen:
* The process gets sequence number N from the kernel for an implicitly-sync'd buffer. * The process inserts (into the GPU user-mapped queue) a wait for sequence number N-1. * The process inserts a wait for a fence, but it doesn't know that it will never signal ==> deadlock. ... * The process inserts a command to write sequence number N to a predetermined memory location. (which will make the buffer idle and send an interrupt to the kernel) ... * The kernel will terminate the process because it has never received the interrupt. (i.e. a less-privileged process just killed a more-privileged process)
It's the interrupt for implicit sync that never arrived that caused the termination, and the only way another process can cause it is by sending a fence that will never signal. Thus, importing/exporting fences from/to other processes can't be allowed simultaneously with implicit sync.
3) Compositors (and other privileged processes, and display flipping) can't trust imported/exported fences. They need a timeout recovery mechanism from the beginning, and the following are some possible solutions to timeouts:
a) use a CPU wait with a small absolute timeout, and display the previous content on timeout b) use a GPU wait with a small absolute timeout, and conditional rendering will choose between the latest content (if signalled) and previous content (if timed out)
The result would be that the desktop can run close to 60 fps even if an app runs at 1 fps.
*Redefining imported/exported fences and breaking some users/OSs is the only way to have userspace GPU command submission, and the deadlock example here is the counterexample proving that there is no other way.*
So, what are the chances this is going to fly with the ecosystem?
Thanks, Marek