drm pixel formats update

[Laurent Pinchart]

Hi Ville,

Sorry for the late reply.

(Cross-posting to the linux-fbdev and linux-media mailing lists, as the topics 
I'm about to discuss are of interest to everybody)

On Wednesday 16 November 2011 19:42:23 ville.syrjala at linux.intel.com wrote:
> I decided to go all out with the pixel format definitions. Added pretty
> much all of the possible RGB/BGR variations. Just left out ones with
> 16bit components and floats. Also added a whole bunch of YUV formats,
> and 8 bit pseudocolor for good measure.
> 
> I'm sure some of the fourccs now clash with the ones used by v4l2,
> but that's life.

Disclaimer: I realize this is a somehow controversial topic, and I'm not 
trying to start a flame war :-)

What about defining a common set of fourccs for both subsystem (and using them 
in FBDEV, which currently uses the V4L2 fourccs) ?

There's more and more overlap between DRM, FBDEV and V4L2, which results in 
confusion for the user and mess in the kernel. I believe cleaning this up will 
become more and more important with time, and also probably more and more 
difficult if we don't act now.

There's no way we will all quickly agree on a big picture unified architecture 
(I don't even know what it should look like), so I'm thinking about starting 
small and see where it will lead us. Sharing fourccs would be such a first 
step, and would make it easier for drivers to implement several of the DRM, 
FBDEV and V4L2 APIs.

Another step I'd like to take would be working on sharing the video mode 
definitions between subsystems. DRM has struct drm_mode_modeinfo and FBDEV has 
struct fb_videomode. The former can't be modified as it's used in userspace 
APIs, but I believe we should create a common in-kernel structure to represent 
modes. This would also make it easier to share the EDID parser between DRM and 
FBDEV.

One issue here is names. I understand that using names from another subsystem 
in a driver that has nothing to do with it (like using V4L2_PIX_FMT_* in DRM, 
or drm_mode_modeinfo in FBDEV) can be frustrating for many developers, so I'd 
like to propose an alternative. We have a media-related kernel API that is 
cross-subsystem, that's the media controller. It uses the prefix media_. We 
could use more specific versions of that preview (such as media_video_ and 
media_display_) as a neutral ground.

Another issue is control. It's quite natural to be suspicious about subsystems 
we're not familiar with, and giving up control on things we consider as highly 
important to other subsystems feels dangerous and wrong. Once again, media_* 
could be an answer to this problem. Instead of trying to push other subsystems 
to use our APIs (which are, obviously, the best possible ever, as they're the 
ones we work on :-)) with the promise that we will extend them to fullfill 
their needs if necessary, we could design new shared structures and core 
functions together with a media_ prefix, and make sure they fullfill all the 
needs from the start. What I like about this approach is that each of the 3 
video-related subsystems would then benefit from the experience of the other 
2.

To make it perfectly clear, I want to emphasize that I'm not trying to replace 
DRM, FBDEV and V4L2 with a new shared subsystem. What I would like to see in 
the (near future) is collaboration and sharing of core features that make 
sense to share. I believe we should address this from a "pain point" point of 
view. The one that lead me to writing this e-mail is that developing a driver 
that implements both the DRM and FBDEV APIs for video output currently 
requires various similar structures, and code to translate between all of 
them. That code can't be shared between multiple drivers, is error-prone, and 
painful to maintin.

I can (and actually would like to) submit an RFC, but I would first like to 
hear your opinion on the topic.

> If anyone has problems with the way the formats are defined, please
> speak up now! Since only Jesse has bothered to comment on my rantings
> I can only assume people are happy with my approach to things.
> 
> These patches should apply on top of Jesse's v3+v5 set... I think.
> I sort of lost track of things when the patches started having
> different version numbers. At least we're not yet into two digits
> numbers ;)

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart