TTM Huge Page Table Entries Pending For Lowering Graphics Driver CPU Usage

Longtime open-source Linux graphics developer Thomas Hellström of VMware has sent out a patch series aiming for Linux 5.7 or 5.8 to introduce support for huge and giant page-table entries for the TTM memory management code and TTM-enabled graphics drivers.

The TTM huge page-table entries support is aimed at reducing CPU usage and to ideally reduce TLB misses. With a sample test program and using VMware's VMWGFX virtual driver stack, the time to run was about halved.

This pull request implements the infrastructure within the Linux kernel for TTM huge/giant page-table entries as well as making appropriate modifications to the VMWGFX DRM kernel driver. Other TTM-using kernel graphics drivers like AMDGPU were not touched.

Thomas is hoping to see this TTM memory management improvement merged for Linux 5.7 or 5.8.