[PATCH RFC 102/111] staging: etnaviv: separate GPU pipes from execution state

[Alex Deucher]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 3:46 AM, Lucas Stach <l.stach at pengutronix.de> wrote:
> Am Sonntag, den 05.04.2015, 21:41 +0200 schrieb Christian Gmeiner:
>> 2015-04-02 18:37 GMT+02:00 Russell King - ARM Linux <linux at arm.linux.org.uk>:
>> > On Thu, Apr 02, 2015 at 05:30:44PM +0200, Lucas Stach wrote:
>> >> While this isn't the case on i.MX6 a single GPU pipe can have
>> >> multiple rendering backend states, which can be selected by the
>> >> pipe switch command, so there is no strict mapping between the
>> >> user "pipes" and the PIPE_2D/PIPE_3D execution states.
>> >
>> > This is good, because on Dove we have a single Vivante core which
>> > supports both 2D and 3D together.  It's always bugged me that
>> > etnadrm has not treated cores separately from their capabilities.
>> >
>>
>> Today I finally got the idea how this multiple pipe stuff should be
>> done the right way - thanks Russell.
>> So maybe you/we need to rework how the driver is designed regarding
>> cores and pipes.
>>
>> On the imx6 we should get 3 device nodes each only supporting one pipe
>> type. On the dove we
>> should get only one device node supporting 2 pipes types. What do you think?
>>
> Sorry, but I strongly object against the idea of having multiple DRM
> device nodes for the different pipes.
>
> If we need the GPU2D and GPU3D to work together (and I can already see
> use-cases where we need to use the GPU2D in MESA to do things the GPU3D
> is incapable of) we would then need a lot more DMA-BUFs to get buffers
> across the devices. This is a waste of resources and complicates things
> a lot as we would then have to deal with DMA-BUF fences just to get the
> synchronization right, which is a no-brainer if we are on the same DRM
> device.
>
> Also it does not allow us to make any simplifications to the userspace
> API, so I can't really see any benefit.
>
> Also on Dove I think one would expect to get a single pipe capable of
> executing in both 2D and 3D state. If userspace takes advantage of that
> one could leave the sync between both engines to the FE, which is a good
> thing as this allows the kernel to do less work. I don't see why we
> should throw this away.

Just about all modern GPUs support varying combinations of independent
pipelines and we currently support this just fine via a single device
node in other drm drivers.  E.g., modern radeons support one or more
gfx, compute, dma, video decode and video encode engines.  What
combination is present depends on the asic.

Alex

>
> Regards,
> Lucas
>
> --
> Pengutronix e.K.             | Lucas Stach                 |
> Industrial Linux Solutions   | http://www.pengutronix.de/  |
>
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