[Intel-gfx] [PATCH] drm/i915: Avoid flicker with horizontal panning on 830GM

[Ville Syrjälä]

On Mon, Sep 02, 2013 at 09:10:22AM +0200, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 01, 2013 at 07:01:49PM +0200, Thomas Richter wrote:
> > Dear intel-gfx developers,
> > 
> > When panning is enabled on the 830GM, horizontal panning creates a
> > lot of flickering on specific pixel positions.
> > After testing, I found that the reason for this is that panning
> > works by altering the frame origin pointer, which,
> > however, has certain alignment restrictions. If the pointer is not
> > aligned correctly, the screen starts to flicker
> > as, probably, DMA fails.
> > 
> > The following patch against drm/i915/intel_display.c fixes the issue
> > by ensuring correct alignment. As result,
> > horizontal panning works correctly, but is a bit "jumpy". Unclear
> > whether the problem affects any other
> > chipset revisions, thus the patch is currently only enabled for rev.2.
> 
> I've just looked at the docs and they only mention that the base address
> must be pixel aligned.

I first thought this might be some issue w/ double wide mode (if it's
enabled, not sure) but I don't see any relevant restrictions for double
wide. But that investigation spurred me to write pipe config support for
double wide mode. I'll post those after a quick smoke test.

BTW my 855 isn't affected by this issue. First I though I was seeing
something similar but it turns out I had set the fb size too big, so the
ddx had to resort to copying.

Another idea that I had was that I think 830 has a bit of wonkiness w/
the double buffered registers (latching happens regardless of DSPADDR
writes, and reads use the the active set of registers). But I don't
think that can explain your issue especially since DSPCNTR is the only
register we read in set_base.

-- 
Ville Syrjälä
Intel OTC