Historically, the Vertex Fetcher unit has not been an L3 client. That
meant that, when a buffer containing vertex data was written to, it was
necessary to issue a PIPE_CONTROL::VF Cache Invalidate to invalidate any
VF L2 cachelines associated with that buffer, so the new value would be
properly read from memory.
Since Tigerlake and later, VERTEX_BUFFER_STATE and 3DSTATE_INDEX_BUFFER
have included an "L3 Bypass Enable" bit which userspace drivers can set
to request that the vertex fetcher unit snoop L3. However, unlike most
true L3 clients, the "VF Cache Invalidate" bit continues to only
invalidate the VF L2 cache - and not any associated L3 lines.
To handle that, PIPE_CONTROL has a new "L3 Read Only Cache Invalidation
Bit", which according to the docs, "controls the invalidation of the
Geometry streams cached in L3 cache at the top of the pipe." In other
words, the vertex and index buffer data that gets cached in L3 when
"L3 Bypass Disable" is set.
Mesa always sets L3 Bypass Disable so that the VF unit snoops L3, and
whenever it issues a VF Cache Invalidate, it also issues a L3 Read Only
Cache Invalidate so that both L2 and L3 vertex data is invalidated.
xe is issuing VF cache invalidates too (which handles cases like CPU
writes to a buffer between GPU batches). Because userspace may enable
L3 snooping, it needs to issue an L3 Read Only Cache Invalidate as well.
Fixes significant flickering in Firefox on Meteorlake, which was writing
to vertex buffers via the CPU between batches; the missing L3 Read Only
invalidates were causing the vertex fetcher to read stale data from L3.
Closes: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/xe/kernel/-/issues/4460
Fixes: 6ef3bb6055 ("drm/xe: enable lite restore")
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # v6.13+
Signed-off-by: Kenneth Graunke <kenneth@whitecape.org>
Reviewed-by: Rodrigo Vivi <rodrigo.vivi@intel.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250330165923.56410-1-rodrigo.vivi@intel.com
Signed-off-by: Rodrigo Vivi <rodrigo.vivi@intel.com>
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