It appears drm-next TTM cleanup broke something . . .

[Alex Deucher]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2020 at 3:43 PM Kevin Brace <kevinbrace at gmx.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Sam,
>
> Thanks for asking the question.
> The current OpenChrome DRM code has these two major issues.
>
> 1) It does not support atomic modesetting
>
> I do internally have working code to support atomic modesetting, but it is not ready for committing into the upstream OpenChrome DRM repository.
> In particular, it suffers from a freeze relating to a cursor plane.
> The freeze is a bad kind that kern.log does not really tell me what is wrong.
> If I disable hardware cursor, the atomic modesetting based OpenChrome DRM appears to work okay.
> In other words, I am getting close to getting atomic modesetting working, but I am stuck.
>
>
> 2) Double allocation of visible portion of frame buffer
>
> This is a big problem left behind from the previous developer who developed OpenChrome prior to me.
> For some reason, the developer wanted to allocate visible portion of the frame buffer to be the maximum possible size supported by the detected monitor when initializing the frame buffer inside OpenChrome DRM code.
> I believe Radeon DRM does something similar to that.
> The problem is, OpenChrome DDX allocates an equal sized frame buffer visible portion during the DDX's initialization.
> This means that we got two same sized visible portions allocated, but OpenChrome DDX and OpenChrome DRM combined should really be allocating only one.
> At this point, OpenChrome is not supporting double buffering.
> This double allocation of a visible portion of the frame buffer contributes to a X Server crash when the screen is resized and 16 MB or less (i.e., 8 MB) shared frame buffer is reserved by the system via BIOS setup.
> I personally think letting OpenChrome DRM allocate the visible portion of the frame buffer is the way to go, but if so, how do I get the DDX or shadow FB to access the frame buffer visible portion allocated by OpenChrome DRM?
> Any suggestions on what to do about this issue will be greatly appreciated.

All drivers do this.  You have one buffer for the fbdev console and
then userspace allocates buffers it needs in addition, otherwise,
you'd overwrite your console.  You can disable it by not enabling the
fbdev emulation if you don't want a console.

Alex


> Perhaps, I should post a question to dri-devel regarding this issue.
> I really do not know what I should do at this point.
>
> Regards,
>
> Kevin Brace
> Brace Computer Laboratory blog
> https://bracecomputerlab.com
>
>
> > Sent: Sunday, October 18, 2020 at 2:04 PM
> > From: "Sam Ravnborg" <sam at ravnborg.org>
> > To: "Kevin Brace" <kevinbrace at gmx.com>
> > Cc: dri-devel at lists.freedesktop.org, "Dave Airlie" <airlied at redhat.com>
> > Subject: Re: It appears drm-next TTM cleanup broke something . . .
> >
> > Hi Kevin.
> >
> > On Sun, Oct 18, 2020 at 09:15:17PM +0200, Kevin Brace wrote:
> > > As usual, I pulled in DRM repository code for an out of tree OpenChrome DRM repository a few days ago.
> >
> > I know you have been working on and off on the openchrome driver for a
> > long time now. Any chance we will see the driver submitted for upstream soon?
> >
> >       Sam
> >
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