On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Tom Cooksey tom.cooksey@arm.com wrote:

...

...

...

...

Didn't you say that programmatically describing device placement constraints was an unbounded problem? I guess we would have to accept that it's not possible to describe all possible constraints and instead find a way to describe the common ones?

well, the point I'm trying to make, is by dividing your constraints into two groups, one that impacts and is handled by userspace, and one that is in the kernel (ie. where the pages go), you cut down the number of permutations that the kernel has to care about considerably. And kernel already cares about, for example, what range of addresses that a device can dma to/from. I think really the only thing missing is the max # of sglist entries (contiguous or not)

I think it's more than physically contiguous or not.

For example, it can be more efficient to use large page sizes on devices with IOMMUs to reduce TLB traffic. I think the size and even the availability of large pages varies between different IOMMUs.

sure.. but I suppose if we can spiff out dma_params to express "I need contiguous", perhaps we can add some way to express "I prefer as-contiguous-as-possible".. either way, this is about where the pages are placed, and not about the layout of pixels within the page, so should be in kernel. It's something that is missing, but I believe that it belongs in dma_params and hidden behind dma_alloc_*() for simple drivers.

Thinking about it, isn't this more a property of the IOMMU? I mean, are there any cases where an IOMMU had a large page mode but you wouldn't want to use it? So when allocating the memory, you'd have to take into account not just the constraints of the devices themselves, but also of any IOMMUs any of the device sit behind?

...

...

There's also the issue of buffer stride alignment. As I say, if the buffer is to be written by a tile-based GPU like Mali, it's more efficient if the buffer's stride is aligned to the max AXI bus burst length. Though I guess a buffer stride only makes sense as a concept when interpreting the data as a linear-layout 2D image, so perhaps belongs in user-space along with format negotiation?

Yeah.. this isn't about where the pages go, but about the arrangement within a page.

And, well, except for hw that supports the same tiling (or compressed-fb) in display+gpu, you probably aren't sharing tiled buffers.

You'd only want to share a buffer between devices if those devices can understand the same pixel format. That pixel format can't be device- specific or opaque, it has to be explicit. I think drm_fourcc.h is what defines all the possible pixel formats. This is the enum I used in EGL_EXT_image_dma_buf_import at least. So if we get to the point where multiple devices can understand a tiled or compressed format, I assume we could just add that format to drm_fourcc.h and possibly v4l2's v4l2_mbus_pixelcode enum in v4l2-mediabus.h.

For user-space to negotiate a common pixel format and now stride alignment, I guess it will obviously need a way to query what pixel formats a device supports and what its stride alignment requirements are.

I don't know v4l2 very well, but it certainly seems the pixel format can be queried using V4L2_SUBDEV_FORMAT_TRY when attempting to set a particular format. I couldn't however find a way to retrieve a list of supported formats - it seems the mechanism is to try out each format in turn to determine if it is supported. Is that right?

There doesn't however seem a way to query what stride constraints a V4l2 device might have. Does HW abstracted by v4l2 typically have such constraints? If so, how can we query them such that a buffer allocated by a DRM driver can be imported into v4l2 and used with that HW?

Turning to DRM/KMS, it seems the supported formats of a plane can be queried using drm_mode_get_plane. However, there doesn't seem to be a way to query the supported formats of a crtc? If display HW only supports scanning out from a single buffer (like pl111 does), I think it won't have any planes and a fb can only be set on the crtc. In which case, how should user-space query which pixel formats that crtc supports?

Assuming user-space can query the supported formats and find a common one, it will need to allocate a buffer. Looks like drm_mode_create_dumb can do that, but it only takes a bpp parameter, there's no format parameter. I assume then that user-space defines the format and tells the DRM driver which format the buffer is in when creating the fb with drm_mode_fb_cmd2, which does take a format parameter? Is that right?

As with v4l2, DRM doesn't appear to have a way to query the stride constraints? Assuming there is a way to query the stride constraints, there also isn't a way to specify them when creating a buffer with DRM, though perhaps the existing pitch parameter of drm_mode_create_dumb could be used to allow user-space to pass in a minimum stride as well as receive the allocated stride?

...

...

...

...

One problem with this is it duplicates a lot of logic in each driver which can export a dma_buf buffer. Each exporter will need to do pretty much the same thing: iterate over all the attachments, determine of all the constraints (assuming that can be done) and allocate pages such that the lowest-common- denominator is satisfied. Perhaps rather than duplicating that logic in every driver, we could instead move allocation of the backing pages into dma_buf itself?

I tend to think it is better to add helpers as we see common

...

...

patterns emerge, which drivers can opt-in to using. I don't think that we should move allocation into dma_buf itself, but it would perhaps be useful to have dma_alloc_*() variants that could allocate for multiple devices.

A helper could work I guess, though I quite like the idea of having dma_alloc_*() variants which take a list of devices to allocate memory for.

...

That would help for simple stuff, although I'd suspect eventually a GPU driver will move away from that. (Since you probably want to play tricks w/ pools of pages that are pre-zero'd and in the correct cache state, use spare cycles on the gpu or dma engine to pre-zero uncached pages, and games like that.)

So presumably you're talking about a GPU driver being the exporter here? If so, how could the GPU driver do these kind of tricks on memory shared with another device?

Yes, that is gpu-as-exporter. If someone else is allocating buffers, it is up to them to do these tricks or not. Probably there is a pretty good chance that if you aren't a GPU you don't need those sort of tricks for fast allocation of transient upload buffers, staging textures, temporary pixmaps, etc. Ie. I don't really think a v4l camera or video decoder would benefit from that sort of optimization.

Right - but none of those are really buffers you'd want to export with dma_buf to share with another device are they? In which case, why not just have dma_buf figure out the constraints and allocate the memory?

If a driver needs to allocate memory in a special way for a particular device, I can't really imagine how it would be able to share that buffer with another device using dma_buf? I guess a driver is likely to need some magic voodoo to configure access to the buffer for its device, but surely that would be done by the dma_mapping framework when dma_buf_map happens?

...

...

...

You probably want to get out of the SoC mindset, otherwise you are going to make bad assumptions that come back to bite you later on.

Sure - there are always going to be PC-like devices where the hardware configuration isn't fixed like it is on a traditional SoC. But I'd rather have a simple solution which works on traditional SoCs than no solution at all. Today our solution is to over-load the dumb buffer alloc functions of the display's DRM driver - For now I'm just looking for the next step up from that! ;-)

True.. the original intention, which is perhaps a bit desktop-centric, really was for there to be a userspace component talking to the drm driver for allocation, ie. xf86-video-foo and/or src/gallium/drivers/foo (for example) ;-)

Which means for x11 having a SoC vendor specific xf86-video-foo for x11.. or vendor specific gbm implementation for wayland. (Although at least in the latter case it is a pretty small piece of code.) But that is probably what you are trying to avoid.

I've been trying to get my head around how PRIME relates to DDX drivers. As I understand it (which is likely wrong), you have a laptop with both an Intel & an nVidia GPU. You have both the i915 & nouveau kernel drivers loaded. What I'm not sure about is which GPU's display controller is actually hooked up to the physical connector? Perhaps there is a MUX like there is on Versatile Express?

What I also don't understand is what DDX driver is loaded? Is it xf86-video-intel, xf86-video-nouveau or both? I get the impression that there's a "master" DDX which implements 2D operations but can import buffers using PRIME from the other driver and draw to them. Or is it more that it's able to export rendered buffers to the "slave" DRM for scanout? Either way, it's pretty similar to an ARM SoC setup which has the GPU and the display as two totally independent devices.

In the early days, there was a MUX to switch the displays between the two GPUs, but most modern systems are MUX-less and the dGPU is either connected to no displays or in some cases the local panel is attached to the integrated GPU and the external displays are connected to the dGPU.

In the MUX-less case, the dGPU can be used to render, and then the result is copied to the integrated GPU for display.

Alex