Raspberry Pi V3D Graphics Driver Preps For Super Pages To Boost Performance

Igalia continues maintaining the Broadcom V3D open-source graphics driver code that is used by the Raspberry Pi single board computers. With a new patch series posted today for the V3D DRM driver, support for Super Pages is enabled to help with enhancing the graphics performance. In many benchmarks having Super Pages can enhance the performance by a few percent but in some extreme cases can be 19~42% faster.

Super Pages in this context is leveraging 1MB pages supported by the V3D MMU. Igalia's Maira Canal explained of the feature:

"This series introduces support for super pages in V3D. The V3D MMU has support for 1MB pages, called super pages, which is currently not used. Therefore, this patchset has the intention to enable super pages in V3D. The advantage of enabling super pages size is that if any entry for a page within a super page is cached in the MMU, it will be used for translation of all virtual addresses in the range of that super pages without requiring fetching any other entries.

Super pages essentially means a slightly better performance for users, especially in applications with high memory requirements (e.g. applications that uses multiple large BOs)."

Performance tests on both Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 boards show up to a few percent improvement while in select cases like Warzone 2100 the performance could be as much as 41% better with V3D super pages.

See this patch series for the V3D Super Pages support now undergoing code review.