MIPI DSI, DBI, and tinydrm drivers

[Paul Cercueil]

Hi Daniel,

Le dim. 24 mai 2020 à 20:35, Daniel Vetter <daniel at ffwll.ch> a écrit :
> On Sun, May 24, 2020 at 7:46 PM Noralf Trønnes <noralf at tronnes.org> 
> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>  Den 24.05.2020 18.13, skrev Paul Cercueil:
>>  > Hi list,
>>  >
>>  > I'd like to open a discussion about the current support of MIPI 
>> DSI and
>>  > DBI panels.
>>  >
>>  > Both are standards from the MIPI alliance, both are communication
>>  > protocols between a LCD controller and a LCD panel, they 
>> generally both
>>  > use the same commands (DCS), the main difference is that DSI is 
>> serial
>>  > and DBI is generally parallel.
>>  >
>>  > In the kernel right now, DSI is pretty well implemented. All the
>>  > infrastucture to register a DSI host, DSI device etc. is there. 
>> DSI
>>  > panels are implemented as regular drm_panel instances, and their 
>> drivers
>>  > go through the DSI API to communicate with the panel, which makes 
>> them
>>  > independent of the DSI host driver.
>>  >
>>  > DBI, on the other hand, does not have any of this. All (?) DBI 
>> panels
>>  > are implemented as tinydrm drivers, which make them impossible to 
>> use
>>  > with regular DRM drivers. Writing a standard drm_panel driver is
>>  > impossible, as there is no concept of host and device. All these 
>> tinydrm
>>  > drivers register their own DBI host as they all do DBI over SPI.
>>  >
>>  > I think this needs a good cleanup. Given that DSI and DBI are so
>>  > similar, it would probably make sense to fuse DBI support into the
>>  > current DSI code, as trying to update DBI would result in a lot 
>> of code
>>  > being duplicated. With the proper host/device registration 
>> mechanism
>>  > from DSI code, it would be possible to turn most of the tinydrm 
>> drivers
>>  > into regular drm_panel drivers.
> 
> Do we have drivers with dbi support that actually want to reuse the
> tinydrm drivers? Good clean is all good, but we need a solid reason
> for changing stuff. Plus we need to make sure we're not just
> rediscovering all the old reasons for why we ended up where we are
> right now in the first place.

I'm trying to interface a ILI9331 based panel that has a DBI/8080 
interface. The ILI9331 is very similar to the ILI9341 which already has 
a tinydrm driver. My SoC has a dedicated DBI/DSI controller, and I have 
currently no way to make it work with the ingenic-drm driver.

The idea of a generic drm_panel tinydrm driver was to avoid duplicating 
code between regular panel and tinydrm drivers, but the focus of my 
email was more to point that right now there is no way to interface a 
DBI panel with a regular DRM driver. Unlike DSI, there are currently no 
drivers with DBI support as there is no API to register a host DBI 
driver or a DBI panel driver. This is what's really missing here.

Cheers,
-Paul

>>  > The problem then is that these should still be available as 
>> tinydrm
>>  > drivers. If the DSI/DBI panels can somehow register a .update_fb()
>>  > callback, it would make it possible to have a panel-agnostic 
>> tinydrm
>>  > driver, which would then probably open a lot of doors, and help a 
>> lot to
>>  > clean the mess.
>>  >
>>  > I think I can help with that, I just need some guidance - I am 
>> fishing
>>  > in exotic seas here.
>>  >
>>  > Thoughts, comments, are very welcome.
>> 
>>  I did look at this a few months back:
>> 
>>  drm/mipi-dbi: Support panel drivers
>>  
>> https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2019-August/228966.html
>> 
>>  The problem with DBI is that it has reused other busses which means 
>> we
>>  don't have DBI drivers, we have SPI drivers instead (6800/8080 is 
>> not
>>  avail. as busses in Linux yet). DSI and DPI on the other hand has
>>  dedicated hw controller drivers not shared with other subsystems.
>> 
>>  My initial tinydrm work used drm_panel, but I was not allowed to 
>> use it
>>  (at least not the way I had done it).
> 
> Hm, do we have a summary of all the discussions/reasons from back
> then? All I remember is that it's all that simple, you've done a lot
> of work exploring all the options, I'm fairly sure I suggested
> drm_panel even back then but somehow it didn't really work. Would be
> good if we make sure we don't at least repeat history too much :-)
> 
> Cheers, Daniel
> 
>> 
>>  Noralf.
>> 
>>  >
>>  > Cheers,
>>  > -Paul
>>  >
>>  >
>>  _______________________________________________
>>  dri-devel mailing list
>>  dri-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
>>  https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Daniel Vetter
> Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
> +41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch