[RFC v2 0/5] Common Display Framework

[Laurent Pinchart]

Hi Rob,

On Thursday 27 December 2012 09:54:55 Rob Clark wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 7:37 AM, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > On Tuesday 18 December 2012 00:21:32 Rob Clark wrote:
> >> On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 11:04 PM, Dave Airlie <airlied at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> >> Many developers showed interest in the first RFC, and I've had the
> >> >> opportunity to discuss it with most of them. I would like to thank (in
> >> >> no particular order) Tomi Valkeinen for all the time he spend helping
> >> >> me to draft v2, Marcus Lorentzon for his useful input during Linaro
> >> >> Connect Q4 2012, and Linaro for inviting me to Connect and providing a
> >> >> venue to discuss this topic.
> >> > 
> >> > So this might be a bit off topic but this whole CDF triggered me
> >> > looking at stuff I generally avoid:
> >> > 
> >> > The biggest problem I'm having currently with the whole ARM graphics
> >> > and output world is the proliferation of platform drivers for every
> >> > little thing. The whole ordering of operations with respect to things
> >> > like suspend/resume or dynamic power management is going to be a real
> >> > nightmare if there are dependencies between the drivers. How do you
> >> > enforce ordering of s/r operations between all the various components?
> >> 
> >> I tend to think that sub-devices are useful just to have a way to probe
> >> hw which may or may not be there, since on ARM we often don't have any
> >> alternative.. but beyond that, suspend/resume, and other life-cycle
> >> aspects, they should really be treated as all one device. Especially to
> >> avoid undefined suspend/resume ordering.
> > 
> > I tend to agree, except that I try to reuse the existing PM infrastructure
> > when possible to avoid reinventing the wheel. So far handling
> > suspend/resume ordering related to data busses in early suspend/late
> > resume operations and allowing the Linux PM core to handle control busses
> > using the Linux device tree worked pretty well.
> > 
> >> CDF or some sort of mechanism to share panel drivers between drivers is
> >> useful.  Keeping it within drm, is probably a good idea, if nothing else
> >> to simplify re-use of helper fxns (like avi-infoframe stuff, for example)
> >> and avoid dealing with merging changes across multiple trees. Treating
> >> them more like shared libraries and less like sub-devices which can be
> >> dynamically loaded/unloaded (ie. they should be not built as separate
> >> modules or suspend/resumed or probed/removed independently of the master
> >> driver) is a really good idea to avoid uncovering nasty synchronization
> >> issues later (remove vs modeset or pageflip) or surprising userspace in
> >> bad ways.
> >
> > We've tried that in V4L2 years ago and realized that the approach led to a
> > dead-end, especially when OF/DT got involved. With DT-based device
> > probing, I2C camera sensors started getting probed asynchronously to the
> > main camera device, as they are children of the I2C bus master. We will
> > have similar issues with I2C HDMI transmitters or panels, so we should be
> > prepared for it.
>
> What I've done to avoid that so far is that the master device registers the
> drivers for it's output sub-devices before registering it's own device.

I'm not sure to follow you here. The master device doesn't register anything, 
do you mean the master device driver ? If so, how does the master device 
driver register its own device ? Devices are not registered by their driver.

> At least this way I can control that they are probed first. Not the
> prettiest thing, but avoids even uglier problems.
>
> > On PC hardware the I2C devices are connected to an I2C master provided by
> > the GPU, but on embedded devices they are usually connected to an
> > independent I2C master. We thus can't have a single self-contained driver
> > that controls everything internally, and need to interface with the rest
> > of the SoC drivers.
> > 
> > I agree that probing/removing devices independently of the master driver
> > can lead to bad surprises, which is why I want to establish clear rules
> > in CDF regarding what can and can't be done with display entities.
> > Reference counting will be one way to make sure that devices don't
> > disappear all of a sudden.
>
> That at least helps cover some issues.. although it doesn't really help
> userspace confusion.
> 
> Anyways, with enough work perhaps all problems could be solved.. otoh, there
> are plenty of other important problems to solve in the world of gpus and
> kms, so my preference is always not to needlessly over-complicate CDF and
> instead leave some time for other things

My customer is interested in CDF at the moment. If they ask me to solve other 
GPU-related problems, sure, I can work on that, but that's not planned.

> >> > The other thing I'd like you guys to do is kill the idea of fbdev and
> >> > v4l drivers that are "shared" with the drm codebase, really just
> >> > implement fbdev and v4l on top of the drm layer, some people might
> >> > think this is some sort of maintainer thing, but really nothing else
> >> > makes sense, and having these shared display frameworks just to avoid
> >> > having using drm/kms drivers seems totally pointless. Fix the drm
> >> > fbdev emulation if an fbdev interface is needed. But creating a fourth
> >> > framework because our previous 3 frameworks didn't work out doesn't
> >> > seem like a situation I want to get behind too much.
> >> 
> >> yeah, let's not have multiple frameworks to do the same thing.. For
> >> fbdev, it is pretty clear that it is a dead end.  For v4l2 (subdev+mcf),
> >> it is perhaps bit more flexible when it comes to random arbitrary hw
> >> pipelines than kms.  But to take advantage of that, your userspace isn't
> >> going to be portable anyways, so you might as well use driver specific
> >> properties/ioctls.  But I tend to think that is more useful for cameras.
> >> And from userspace perspective, kms planes are less painful to use for
> >> output than v4l2, so lets stick to drm/kms for output (and not try to add
> >> camera/capture support to kms)..
> > 
> > Agreed. I've started to advocate the deprecation of FBDEV during LPC. The
> > positive response has motivated me to continue doing so :-) For V4L2 the
> > situation is a little bit different, I think V4L2 shouldn't be used for
> > graphics and display hardware, but it still has use cases on the video
> > output side for pure video devices (such as pass-through video pipelines
> > with embedded processing for instance). As those can use subdevices found
> > in display and graphics hardware, I'd like to avoid code duplication.

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart