A patch series posted today for Nouveau, the open-source NVIDIA kernel driver within the mainline Linux tree, can help overcome some performance obstacles currently observed with the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver.
The patch series worked on by Mohamed Ahmed, Mary Guillemard, and Ben Skeggs is for enabling variable page sizes and compression.
Ahmed explained with the Nouveau driver patch series:
“The new VM_BIND interface only supported 4K pages. This was problematic as it leaves performance on the table because GPUs don’t have sophisticated TLB hardware. Additionally, this meant that we couldn’t enable compression on the userspace side as the HW supports compression on larger page sizes only which was a major (>50% in some cases) performance loss.
This patchset sets out to add support for larger page sizes and also enable compression when userspace binds with the corresponding PTE kinds and alignment.”
It will be interesting to see the performance impact in real-world workloads. Unfortunately with the timing of these Nouveau patches they will miss out on the v6.18 merge window.
Those interested can find these Nouveau performance patches for variable page sizes and compression on the dri-devel list.
