[Intel-gfx] [PATCH] drm/i915: revert vga arbiter changes

[Chris Wilson]

On Tue, Oct 08, 2013 at 10:18:54AM -0600, Alex Williamson wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-10-08 at 17:08 +0100, Chris Wilson wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 08, 2013 at 05:27:28PM +0200, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> > > Adding drm/i915 into the vga arbiter chain means that X (in a piece of
> > > well-meant paranoia) will do a get/put on the vga decoding around
> > > _every_ accel call down into the ddx. Which results in some nice
> > > performance disasters [1].
> > 
> > And disables DRI for the system, interferring with the use of OpenGL
> > compositors, playing games, PRIME, etc. This effect is not limited to
> > users of i915, but any system with a dGPU and an igfx enabled Core CPU.
> > 
> > I still think we are downplaying the complete and utter disaster caused
> > by X and the patch, and why the revert is required.
> 
> I'm failing to understand the disaster myself, can you explain?  i915 is
> already attempting to make use of the VGA arbiter, but the code hadn't
> been updated so what it was doing was ineffective.  The external
> difference I see is that before i915 incorrectly reported that it was
> not involved in VGA arbitration (even though it still claims VGA
> transactions).  With the fixes, it opts-out of MMIO arbitration, but
> requires I/O port arbitration.  I'm OK with reverting these and going
> back to the drawing board for v3.13, but what i915 is doing is still
> incorrect and precludes making use of a guest assigned VGA device (or
> separate display server requiring VGA), because we can't use the VGA
> arbiter for what it's designed to do, re-route VGA accesses.  Thanks,

The problem stems from the system reporting to X that there are two
legacy vga IO capable devices, and then X disabling DRI and wrapping
every operation with vga_get/vga_put. X will do this even if it is only
using one of the devices and the other device is not being used by the
system.

We are not arguing that your fix isn't correct, it is just the
rammifications it has to the existing install base outweighs improving
a currently broken feature.
-Chris

-- 
Chris Wilson, Intel Open Source Technology Centre