[PATCH 0/2] drm/atomic: Allow drivers to write their own plane check for async

[Michel Dänzer]

On 2024-01-17 13:57, Xaver Hugl wrote:
> Am Mi., 17. Jan. 2024 um 09:55 Uhr schrieb Pekka Paalanen <ppaalanen at gmail.com>:
>> Is it important enough to be special-cased, e.g. to be always allowed
>> with async commits?
> 
> I thought so, and sent a patch to dri-devel to make it happen, but
> there are some
> concerns about untested driver paths.
> https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2024-January/437511.html
> 
>> Now that I think of it, if userspace needs to wait for the in-fence
>> itself before kicking KMS async, that would defeat much of the async's
>> point, right? And cases where in-fence is not necessary are so rare
>> they might not even exist?
>>
>> So if driver/hardware cannot do IN_FENCE_FD with async, is there any
>> use of supporting async to begin with?
> 
> KWin never commits a buffer where IN_FENCE_FD would actually delay the
> pageflip; it's really only used to disable implicit sync, as there's some edge
> cases where it can wrongly delay the pageflip. The waiting for buffers to become
> readable on the compositor side isn't really significant in terms of latency.
> 
> If hardware doesn't support IN_FENCE_FD with async commits, checking if the
> fence is already signaled at commit time would thus still make things work, at
> least for KWin.

That's how IN_FENCE_FD (and implicit sync) is handled anyway, in common code: It waits for all fences to signal before calling into the driver to commit the atomic commit.

I can't see why this wouldn't work with async commits, the same as with synchronous ones, with any driver.


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer            |                  https://redhat.com
Libre software enthusiast          |         Mesa and Xwayland developer