[Intel-gfx] [PATCH] drm/i915: RMW register cycles considered evil

[Daniel Vetter]

On Mon, Jul 06, 2015 at 03:50:49PM +0300, Ville Syrjälä wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 06, 2015 at 02:42:02PM +0200, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> > Especially for workarounds which is stuff that's almost impossible to
> > verify: The initial state from the firmware on boot-up and after
> > resume could be different, which will hide bugs when we do an RMW
> > cycle.
> 
> If you're really worried about that then we should then explicitly
> initialize all the registers that might affect stuff.
> 
> For a bunch of GT registers we could just do a GPU reset at driver
> init. That that won't help with UCGCTL and such.
> 
> I'm also worried that if we don't use RMWs for early parts, the hardware
> folks may still change the default for some ofhte other bits, and then
> we end up clobbering those.

The point is that we'll at least consistently clobber them, which is the
important part. Chasing a bug which only happens when you freshly boot but
not after the first gpu reset (or first resume or the other way round or
whatever) is not fun at all.

If that means we will botch the context a bit then I guess we need better
tooling to compare the actual hw state with what Bspec suggest, including
all the w/a.
-Daniel
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
http://blog.ffwll.ch