[Mesa-dev] [PATCH 2/2] gallium: add flag PIPE_TRANSFER_MAP_PERMANENTLY

[Jose Fonseca]

----- Original Message -----
> On 10.01.2012 12:29, Jose Fonseca wrote:
> > Still catching up on email traffic during holidays...
> >
> > I agree that user buffer uploads should be moved out of drivers,
> > but I don't think this is the way to go.
> 
> I don't. If the state tracker uploads user buffers and presents them
> to
> the driver as normal buffers, it will have to change the
> pipe_vertex_buffers for each draw, causing annoying re-validation
> overhead. 

This is not strictly necessary.  We could simply use index_bias provided the vertex strides don't change (the likely scenario for the sort of cases you are talking here). Thomas did that something along those lines for the svga driver.

And we could do much better than that: I'm talking about proper reverse-engineering of the application intention, such as using one-shot dynamic vertex buffers for one-shot data, and reusable static vertex buffers for immutable data. Employing both heuristics like scanning the user memory for changes and end of data; and also get information from the OS virtual memory subsystem (e.g., if the user memory pointer is in a read-only segment then it won't likely change, if it's in a stack segment it will likely be one-off, if its in malloc, then we can get an upper bound from the OS).   This analysis / memory tracking is something too complex to do for each driver, but worthwhile if its done in the state tracker for all drivers benefit.

I honestly think that's unnecessary to bother pipe drivers with user pointers and that we should put our bets on solving this problem efficiently once for all -- but I'm fine leaving these user pointers in the interface eternally, for sake of both skeptics and software renderers (who can always benefit from accessing user memory directly). 


> This is very bad if there are a lot of small draw calls.
> Unfortunately many applications do this, and we do care about these
> cases.
> 
> Also, another example I'm dealing with atm, it will be difficult to
> extract a small set of wide-spread vertices from a user buffer into a
> oneshot vertex buffer (there are apps where this really helps a lot)
> because you're changing the vertex index / gl_VertexID.
> I can do that, because I know the hw has a special vertex-index
> buffer
> (nvc0) or manual VERTEX_ID attribute (nv50) that can be routed to the
> VERTEXID system value so I don't need to modify the shader.

Backing user buffers on hardware buffers does not necessary imply remapping vertices -- that's merely how it is implemented now. We could either create a one-shot hardware buffer with the same size and fill in just the necessary spots; or better to recognize the underlying user memory buffer start and size and track changes. We could also expose this vertex-index buffer in the interface (other drivers could implement it as vertex texture).


Probably the best approach is a mixture: back big dynamic/static user buffers in individual hardware buffers, back small dynamic user buffers in linearly suballocated ranges of coarse sized hardware buffers (i.e., what we do now).


Jose