[Mesa-dev] [RFC] Linux Graphics Next: Explicit fences everywhere and no BO fences - initial proposal

[Marek Olšák]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2021 at 2:39 PM Daniel Vetter <daniel at ffwll.ch> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 20, 2021 at 6:25 PM Marek Olšák <maraeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Daniel, imagine hardware that can only do what Windows does: future
> fences signalled by userspace whenever userspace wants, and no kernel
> queues like we have today.
> >
> > The only reason why current AMD GPUs work is because they have a ring
> buffer per queue with pointers to userspace command buffers followed by
> fences. What will we do if that ring buffer is removed?
>
> Well this is an entirely different problem than what you set out to
> describe. This is essentially the problem where hw does not have any
> support for priviledged commands and separate priviledges command
> buffer, and direct userspace submit is the only thing that is
> available.
>
> I think if this is your problem, then you get to implement some very
> interesting compat shim. But that's an entirely different problem from
> what you've described in your mail. This pretty much assumes at the hw
> level the only thing that works is ATS/pasid, and vram is managed with
> HMM exclusively. Once you have that pure driver stack you get to fake
> it in the kernel for compat with everything that exists already. How
> exactly that will look and how exactly you best construct your
> dma_fences for compat will depend highly upon how much is still there
> in this hw (e.g. wrt interrupt generation). A lot of the
> infrastructure was also done as part of drm_syncobj. I mean we have
> entirely fake kernel drivers like vgem/vkms that create dma_fence, so
> a hw ringbuffer is really not required.
>
> So ... is this your problem underneath it all, or was that more a wild
> strawman for the discussion?
>

Yes, that's the problem.

Marek
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