Raspberry Pi V3D Kernel Graphics Driver Prepares For Big & Super Pages To Boost Speed

Last month I wrote about the V3D kernel graphics driver preparing for 1MB "super pages" support to help boost the performance for this open-source Broadcom DRM driver most notably used by the latest Raspberry Pi single board computers. The latest iteration of these patches have now been posted for supporting both super pages and big pages.

While starting off with 1MB "super" pages, the patches have also been extended for handling 64KB "big" pages too. Both of these larger page sizes are supported by the Broadcom V3D MMU and allows caching in the MMU. For most use-cases the big/super pages can mean slightly better performance for apps/games with high memory requirements while in some workloads the big/super page benefits can be quite dramatic.

For most workloads the big and super page performance gains are within a few percent but on select cases like Warzone 2100 traces were as much as 22% faster in the latest tests.

Those interested in this V3D big/super pages work by consulting firm Igalia can find the patches for now on the dri-devel mailing list. Hopefully this big/super pages support for V3D will be ready for mainlining soon to further enhance the performance of Raspberry Pi boards.