* JobSystem now automatically free Jobs
Until now Job allocation used a linear allocator
strategy which required to “reset” the JobSystem
periodically — typically once per frame in
filament.
This is no longer required. We use a pool allocator
now, which doesn’t add much overhead. It does
use a spin-lock for thread-safety though, since
we assume very little contention, this shouldn’t
be a problem.
* Thread Safe Object Pool Allocator
A lock-less, thread-safe object pool allocator,
now used for storing JobSystem’s jobs allocations.
This gets rid of the spin-lock introduced in the
previous cl.
We spawn MAX_LIGHTS/32 (currently 8) jobs and
multi-threading is active as soon as we have more
than one light. All jobs work on disjoint buffers
to avoid false sharing between threads.
It’s possible to adjust roughly the number of jobs
by changing the group size (currently 32). However
this also affects vectorization.
With the current parameters, with 256 lights max
we get 8 jobs, and 4 spot-light test / froxel.
Instead of building a list of froxel per light,
we now build a bitfield of lights per froxel.
To keep the code efficient we have to split
the bitfield array in 4, so that we can use
multiple threads without having them or’ing
each other’s cache-lines.
This data structure is also what we want in
froxelizeAssignRecords(), and the conversion from
one format to the other is much faster.
Our internal data structure is now 256 KiB
instead of 2 MiB. It would be 1 MiB for 1024 lights
(down from 16 MiB)
Additionally, because the code is simpler, we get
more vectorization, especially with spot-lights.
One draw-back of the current version is that
multi-threading happens only every 64 lights.
This will be fixed later.