[PATCH] Add freesync ioctl interface

[Michel Dänzer]

On 09/08/16 06:31 PM, Christian König wrote:
> Am 09.08.2016 um 10:27 schrieb Michel Dänzer:
>> On 09/08/16 05:12 PM, Christian König wrote:
>>> Am 09.08.2016 um 04:44 schrieb Michel Dänzer:
>>>
>>>> I was basically thinking out loud that doing this via different modes
>>>> might be quite natural, *if* games allowed choosing a specific mode.
>>>> But unfortunately they don't. For the video playback case, how do you
>>>> envision the video player app communicating the refresh rate of the
>>>> currently playing video to the kernel?
>>> Again the kernel doesn't need to know the refresh rate. All the kernel
>>> needs to know is when to do the page flip.
>>>
>>> So coming back to my example of a mode with 1920x1080 and 20-100Hz
>>> refresh rate a classic modeline would then look something like this:
>>>
>>> Modeline "1920x1080_dynamic"  302.50  1920 2072 2280 2640  1080 1083
>>> 1088 5735 -hsync +vsync
>>>
>>> Note the high vertical total scan lines. Those basically reduce the
>>> refresh rate from 100Hz (which this mode normally would have) down to
>>> only 20Hz.
>>>
>>> Now what userspace does on each page flip is specifying when this flip
>>> should happen, e.g. when the frame should be started to be scanned out.
>>> We can either specify this as frame counter + vertical line of the
>>> previous frame or as something like CLOCK_MONOTONIC (I think I would
>>> prefer CLOCK_MONOTONIC, but that's not a strong opinion).
>>>
>>> In other words you put the whole concept upside down. It's no longer the
>>> kernel which tells userspace when a vblank happened, but rather
>>> userspace tells the kernel when it should happen (together with the
>>> frame that should be displayed then).
>> I guess that could work. Do video players set the VDPAU presentation
>> time accurately enough for this?
> 
> Yes, of course. We actually get a precise time stamp from the
> application and need to calculate on which vblank to display it from that.
> 
>> This would require extensive changes across the stack though, when more
>> or less the same result could be achieved by just letting the kernel
>> know what the current refresh rate is supposed to be, e.g. via output
>> properties.
> 
> The problem is that you don't have a refresh rate any more.

Maybe not below the video decoding API level, but the video player app
certainly knows the refresh rate?


> Mostly the same applies for games as well, e.g. when you render a frame
> you usually render it for a certain timestamp.

I can only find the EGL_ANDROID_presentation_time extension providing
exactly this functionality. GLX_NV_present_video looks like it covers
this as well, but it also includes a bunch of other stuff.

I think 0 is a good first approximation of the number of applications
used by an average Linux desktop user which make use of either of those
extensions.


> Additional to that are you sure it is such a hassle to implement this? I
> mean let us sum up what we need:
> 1. A representation for the new mode attributes, e.g. minimum and
> maximum vertical refresh rate.
> 
> This is needed anyway to proper communicate the capabilities of the
> display device to userspace.
> 
> 2. An extension to the page flip IOCTL to specify when exactly a flip
> should happen.
> 
> As far as I can see that is what your patchset already did. The only
> difference is that you wanted to specify a certain vertical blank when
> the flip would happen while I would say we should use a monotonic
> timestamp (64bit ns since boot) for this.

Right, the patch series you're referring to isn't directly related to this.


3. Expose this new functionality via the X11 Present extension and/or a
corresponding Wayland extension.

4. Make use of 3. in the Gallium video state tracker code.

Now we're done for the video playback case, phew!


5. Make use of 3. to implement EGL_ANDROID_presentation_time and/or
GLX_NV_present_video.

6. Make game engines use 5.

(A game engine can know when a frame will be ready for presentation when
it starts rendering it, so I'm not sure this functionality will be very
useful for games)


>> Also, this doesn't address the case of running (existing) games with
>> variable refresh rate.
> 
> Sure it does. For the current stack without any change a freesync
> capable display device just looks like a normal monitor with a high
> vertical refresh rate.

You're saying current userspace would just see the maximum vertical
refresh rate as the refresh rate?


> When we add freesync support we just extend vblank_mode with a new enum
> to enable it optionally for existing applications.

"Just"... this will only be possible after the first 3 steps above.


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer               |               http://www.amd.com
Libre software enthusiast             |             Mesa and X developer