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

Tue Apr 7 08:29:40 PDT 2015

Am Dienstag, den 07.04.2015, 17:13 +0200 schrieb Christian Gmeiner:
> 2015-04-07 17:01 GMT+02:00 Lucas Stach <l.stach at pengutronix.de>:
> > Am Dienstag, den 07.04.2015, 16:51 +0200 schrieb Jon Nettleton:
> >>
> >>
> >> On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 4:38 PM, Alex Deucher <alexdeucher at gmail.com>
> >> wrote:
> >>         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.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> That reminds me.  We should also have in the back of our heads that
> >> compute is supported by the newer Vivante chips.  We will also need to
> >> support multiple independent 3d cores as that support has shown up in
> >> the V5 galcore drivers.
> >>
> > AFAIK compute is just another state of the 3D pipe where instead of
> > issuing a draw command you would kick the thread walker.
> >
> > Multicore with a single FE is just a single pipe with chip selects set
> > to the available backends and mirrored pagetables for the MMUs. With
> > more than one FE you get more than one pipe which is more like a SLI
> > setup on the desktop, where userspace has to deal with splitting the
> > render targets into portions for each GPU.
> > One more reason to keep things in one DRM device, as I think no one
> > wants to deal with syncing pagetables across different devices.
> >
> 
> I don't get you naming scheme - sorry.
> 
> For me one Core has a single FE. This single FE can have one pipe or
> multiple pipes. A pipe is the execution unit select via SELECT_PIPE
> command (2d, 3d, ..).
> 
> In the Dove use case we have:
> - 1 Core with one FE
> - 2 pipelines
> 
> In the imx6 case we have:
> - 3 Cores (each has only one FE)
> - every FE only support one type of pipeline.
> 
Okay let's keep it at this: a core is an entity with a FE at the front.
A pipe is the backend fed by the FE selected by the SELECT_PIPE command.

This is currently confusing as I didn't change the naming in the API,
but really the "pipe" parameter in the IOCTLs means core. I'll rename
this for the next round.

> And each Core(/FE) has its own device node. Does this make any sense?
> 
And I don't get why each core needs to have a single device node. IMHO
this is purely an implementation decision weather to have one device
node for all cores or one device node per core.

For now I could only see that one device node per core makes things
harder to get right, while I don't see a single benefit.

Regards,
Lucas

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