Ideally, we want to automagically have the GPU respond to the
instantaneous load by reclocking itself. However, reclocking occurs
relatively slowly, and to the client waiting for a result from the GPU,
too late. To compensate and reduce the client latency, we allow the
first wait from a client to boost the GPU clocks to maximum. This
overcomes the lag in autoreclocking, at the expense of forcing the GPU
clocks too high. So to offset the excessive power usage, we currently
allow a client to only boost the clocks once before we detect the GPU
is idle again. This works reasonably for say the first frame in a
benchmark, but for many more synchronous workloads (like OpenCL) we find
the GPU clocks remain too low. By noting a wait which would idle the GPU
(i.e. we just waited upon the last known request), we can give that
client the idle boost credit (for their next wait) without the 100ms
delay required for us to detect the GPU idle state. The intention is to
boost clients that are stalling in the process of feeding the GPU more
work (and who in doing so let the GPU idle), without granting boost
credits to clients that are throttling themselves (such as compositors).
Signed-off-by: Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>
Cc: "Zou, Nanhai" <nanhai.zou@intel.com>
Cc: Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@virtuousgeek.org>
Reviewed-by: Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@virtuousgeek.org>
Reviewed-by: Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch>
Link: http://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/msgid/1467616119-4093-4-git-send-email-chris@chris-wilson.co.uk