Valve Developer Posts High Priority AMDGPU Scheduling Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 28 February 2017 at 08:17 PM EST. 16 Comments
RADEON
Valve developer Andres Rodriguez has posted a set of 22 patches for supporting high priority scheduling within the AMDGPU kernel driver.

This high priority AMDGPU scheduling work is done as part of their open-source AMD Linux GPU driver improvements for benefiting VR / SteamVR.

Back in December was when Rodriguez laid out the proposal for high priority scheduling in AMDGPU for Linux VR efforts in order to avoid motion sickness. Now he's managed to deliver on the patches for the design talked about back then.

He wrote in part via the new patch series:
This patch series introduces a mechanism that allows users with sufficient privileges to categorize their work as "high priority". A userspace app can create a high priority amdgpu context, where any work submitted to this context will receive preferential treatment over any other work.

High priority contexts will be scheduled ahead of other contexts by the sw gpu scheduler. This functionality is generic for all HW blocks.

The earliest we could see this high priority scheduling support for the AMDGPU DRM driver is Linux 4.12, so it's still a ways from benefiting open-source AMD Linux users interested in VR without potentially getting sick by less than ideal performance.
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