[Intel-gfx] [PATCH] i915: support page flipping

[Chris Wilson]

On Thu, 2009-02-26 at 14:35 -0800, Jesse Barnes wrote:
> On Thursday, February 26, 2009 1:56:52 pm Chris Wilson wrote:
> > On Thu, 2009-02-26 at 13:28 -0800, Jesse Barnes wrote:
> > > Add a new page flip ioctl to the i915 driver.  The new ioctl takes the
> > > new drm_i915_gem_page_flip arg, which contains a buffer object target for
> > > the flip, an offset into that buffer, and other buffer parameters to be
> > > used for the flip.
> > >
> > > If a flip is already pending on the object in question, the ioctl waits
> > > for it to finish first, then queues the flip.  An optional wait flag
> > > causes the ioctl to wait for the flip to complete before the it returns.
> > >
> > > If an execbuffer containing an object with a pending flip comes in, it
> > > will stall until the flip completes, to preserve glXSwapBuffers
> > > semantics.
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Jesse Barnes <jbarnes at virtuousgeek.org>

Hmm, I finally got around to trying this updated variant of the
page-flipping patch having hit a situation whereby the lack of unpinning
of the new scanout buffer was consuming all the fence registers. The
downside of this version, which unpins after vblank, is that this leaves
the fence register covering the scanout buffer on the i915 available for
reuse. [This also confirms that the scanout memory is vulnerable to an
unbind().] The bo must remain pinned until it is no longer the scanout
target -- the flickering (as the scanout rapidly switches between tiled
and untiled) on my i915 is unbearable :(
-ickle