Proposal for a low-level Linux display framework

[Alex Deucher]

On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 3:06 PM, Florian Tobias Schandinat
<FlorianSchandinat at gmx.de> wrote:
> On 09/17/2011 06:23 PM, Dave Airlie wrote:
>>>
>>> Is it? Well, okay, I don't want to use any acceleration that can crash my
>>> machine, where can I select it, preferably as compile time option? I didn't find
>>> such a thing for Intel or Radeon. Don't say, I should rely on userspace here or
>>> use fbdev for this.
>>
>> Just tell the X driver to not use acceleration, and it you won't get
>> any acceleration used, then you get complete stability. If a driver
>> writer wants to turn off all accel in the kernel driver, it can, its
>> not an option we've bothered with for intel or radeon since it really
>> makes no sense. To put it simply you don't really seem to understand
>> the driver model around KMS. If no userspace app uses acceleration
>> then no acceleration features will magically happen. If you want to
>> write a simple app against the KMS API like plymouth you can now use
>> the dumb ioctls to create and map a buffer that can be made into a
>> framebuffer. Also you get hw cursors + modesetting.
>
> Again, you seem to not understand my reasoning. The "if" is the problem, it's
> the kernels job to ensure stability. Allowing the userspace to decide whether it
> crashes my machine is not acceptable to me.
> I do not claim that it is impossible to write a KMS driver in a way that it does
> not crash, but it seems more difficult than writing an fbdev driver.
>

It's perfectly valid to write a KMS DRM driver that doesn't support
acceleration in which case it will be just as "stable" as a fbdev
driver.  In fact on modern hardware it's probably easier to write a
KMS DRM driver than a fbdev driver because the API and internal
abstractions match the hardware better.  If you have hardware with 4
display controllers, 2 DACs, a TMDS encoder, and a DP encoder how do
you decide which combination of components and modes to light up at
boot using fbdev?

Alternatively, if you wanted to support acceleration as well, you can
add a module option to force acceleration off at the kernel level
rather than from userspace.  It's trivial.

Alex