[PATCH 2/2] drm/lima: driver for ARM Mali4xx GPUs

[Dave Airlie]

On Thu, 14 Feb 2019 at 19:12, Christian König via dri-devel
<dri-devel at lists.freedesktop.org> wrote:
>
> Am 14.02.19 um 03:52 schrieb Alex Deucher via dri-devel:
> > [SNIP]
> >>>>> +static int lima_ioctl_gem_va(struct drm_device *dev, void *data, struct drm_file *file)
> >>>>> +{
> >>>>> +       struct drm_lima_gem_va *args = data;
> >>>>> +
> >>>>> +       switch (args->op) {
> >>>>> +       case LIMA_VA_OP_MAP:
> >>>>> +               return lima_gem_va_map(file, args->handle, args->flags, args->va);
> >>>>> +       case LIMA_VA_OP_UNMAP:
> >>>>> +               return lima_gem_va_unmap(file, args->handle, args->va);
> >>>> These are mapping to GPU VA. Why not do that on GEM object creation or
> >>>> import or when the objects are submitted with cmd queue as other
> >>>> drivers do?
> >>>>
> >>>> To put it another way, These ioctls look different than what other
> >>>> drivers do. Why do you need to do things differently? My understanding
> >>>> is best practice is to map and return the GPU offset when the GEM
> >>>> object is created. This is what v3d does. I think Intel is moving to
> >>>> that. And panfrost will do that.
> >>> I think it would be a good idea to look at the amdgpu driver.  This
> >>> driver is heavily modeled after it.  Basically the GEM VA ioctl allows
> >>> userspace to manage per process (per fd really) virtual addresses.
> >> Why do you want userspace to manage assigning VAs versus the kernel to
> >> do so? Exposing that detail to userspace means the driver must support
> >> a per process address space. Letting the kernel assign addresses means
> >> it can either be a single address space or be a per process address
> >> space. It seems to me more flexible to allow the kernel driver to
> >> evolve without that ABI.
> > Having it in userspace provides a lot more flexibility and makes it
> > easier to support things like unified address space between CPU and
> > GPU. I guess it depends on the hw as to what is the right choice.
>
> To summarize we actually have tried this approach with the radeon and it
> turned out to be a really bad mistake.
>
> To implement features like partial residential textures and shared
> virtual address space you absolutely need userspace to be in charge of
> allocating virtual addresses.
>

I think for lima not having this is fine, but for panfrost it really
should have it.

If you can implement vulkan you probably want this, nouveau hasn't a
vulkan driver because of exactly this problem in their uapi, so maybe
adjust panfrost to do user-space managed vma.

Dave.