drm/i915: Use the LLC mode on gen6 for everything but display.

Improves full-screen openarena on my laptop 20.3% +/- 4.0% (n=3)
Improves 800x600 nexuiz on my laptop 12.3% +/- 0.1% (n=3)

We have more room to improve with doing LLC caching for display using
GFDT, and in doing LLC+MLC caching, but this was an easy performance
win and incremental improvement toward those two.

Signed-off-by: Eric Anholt <eric@anholt.net>
Signed-off-by: Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>
Reviewed-by: Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch>

1 files changed, 17 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem.c b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem.c
index fb0538358c34..cb1f61dba5eb 100644
--- a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem.c
+++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem.c
@@ -3700,7 +3700,23 @@ struct drm_i915_gem_object *i915_gem_alloc_object(struct drm_device *dev,
         obj->base.write_domain = I915_GEM_DOMAIN_CPU;
         obj->base.read_domains = I915_GEM_DOMAIN_CPU;
 
-        obj->cache_level = I915_CACHE_NONE;
+        if (IS_GEN6(dev)) {
+                /* On Gen6, we can have the GPU use the LLC (the CPU
+                 * cache) for about a 10% performance improvement
+                 * compared to uncached.  Graphics requests other than
+                 * display scanout are coherent with the CPU in
+                 * accessing this cache.  This means in this mode we
+                 * don't need to clflush on the CPU side, and on the
+                 * GPU side we only need to flush internal caches to
+                 * get data visible to the CPU.
+                 *
+                 * However, we maintain the display planes as UC, and so
+                 * need to rebind when first used as such.
+                 */
+                obj->cache_level = I915_CACHE_LLC;
+        } else
+                obj->cache_level = I915_CACHE_NONE;
+
         obj->base.driver_private = NULL;
         obj->fence_reg = I915_FENCE_REG_NONE;
         INIT_LIST_HEAD(&obj->mm_list);