fbdev: Don't sort deferred-I/O pages by default
Fbdev's deferred I/O sorts all dirty pages by default, which incurs a significant overhead. Make the sorting step optional and update the few drivers that require it. Use a FIFO list by default. Most fbdev drivers with deferred I/O build a bounding rectangle around the dirty pages or simply flush the whole screen. The only two affected DRM drivers, generic fbdev and vmwgfx, both use a bounding rectangle. In those cases, the exact order of the pages doesn't matter. The other drivers look at the page index or handle pages one-by-one. The patch sets the sort_pagelist flag for those, even though some of them would probably work correctly without sorting. Driver maintainers should update their driver accordingly. Sorting pages by memory offset for deferred I/O performs an implicit bubble-sort step on the list of dirty pages. The algorithm goes through the list of dirty pages and inserts each new page according to its index field. Even worse, list traversal always starts at the first entry. As video memory is most likely updated scanline by scanline, the algorithm traverses through the complete list for each updated page. For example, with 1024x768x32bpp each page covers exactly one scanline. Writing a single screen update from top to bottom requires updating 768 pages. With an average list length of 384 entries, a screen update creates (768 * 384 =) 294912 compare operation. Fix this by making the sorting step opt-in and update the few drivers that require it. All other drivers work with unsorted page lists. Pages are appended to the list. Therefore, in the common case of writing the framebuffer top to bottom, pages are still sorted by offset, which may have a positive effect on performance. Playing a video [1] in mplayer's benchmark mode shows the difference (i7-4790, FullHD, simpledrm, kernel with debugging). mplayer -benchmark -nosound -vo fbdev ./big_buck_bunny_720p_stereo.ogg With sorted page lists: BENCHMARKs: VC: 32.960s VO: 73.068s A: 0.000s Sys: 2.413s = 108.441s BENCHMARK%: VC: 30.3947% VO: 67.3802% A: 0.0000% Sys: 2.2251% = 100.0000% With unsorted page lists: BENCHMARKs: VC: 31.005s VO: 42.889s A: 0.000s Sys: 2.256s = 76.150s BENCHMARK%: VC: 40.7156% VO: 56.3219% A: 0.0000% Sys: 2.9625% = 100.0000% VC shows the overhead of video decoding, VO shows the overhead of the video output. Using unsorted page lists reduces the benchmark's run time by ~32s/~25%. v2: * Make sorted pagelists the special case (Sam) * Comment on drivers' use of pagelist (Sam) * Warn about the overhead in comment Signed-off-by: Thomas Zimmermann <tzimmermann@suse.de> Acked-by: Sam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org> Acked-by: Andy Shevchenko <andriy.shevchenko@linux.intel.com> Link: https://download.blender.org/peach/bigbuckbunny_movies/big_buck_bunny_720p_stereo.ogg # [1] Link: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/msgid/20220211094640.21632-3-tzimmermann@suse.de
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