[Intel-gfx] [PATCH v3 31/31] drm/todo: Add entry about dealing with brightness control on devices with > 1 panel

[Hans de Goede]

Add an entry summarizing the discussion about dealing with brightness
control on devices with more then 1 internal panel.

The original discussion can be found here:
https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/20220517152331.16217-1-hdegoede@redhat.com/

Signed-off-by: Hans de Goede <hdegoede at redhat.com>
---
 Documentation/gpu/todo.rst | 68 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 68 insertions(+)

diff --git a/Documentation/gpu/todo.rst b/Documentation/gpu/todo.rst
index 7634c27ac562..393d218e4a0c 100644
--- a/Documentation/gpu/todo.rst
+++ b/Documentation/gpu/todo.rst
@@ -679,6 +679,74 @@ Contact: Sam Ravnborg
 
 Level: Advanced
 
+Brightness handling on devices with multiple internal panels
+============================================================
+
+On x86/ACPI devices there can be multiple backlight firmware interfaces:
+(ACPI) video, vendor specific and others. As well as direct/native (PWM)
+register programming by the KMS driver.
+
+To deal with this backlight drivers used on x86/ACPI call
+acpi_video_get_backlight_type() which has heuristics (+quirks) to select
+which backlight interface to use; and backlight drivers which do not match
+the returned type will not register themselves, so that only one backlight
+device gets registered (in a single GPU setup, see below).
+
+At the moment this more or less assumes that there will only
+be 1 (internal) panel on a system.
+
+On systems with 2 panels this may be a problem, depending on
+what interface acpi_video_get_backlight_type() selects:
+
+1. native: in this case the KMS driver is expected to know which backlight
+   device belongs to which output so everything should just work.
+2. video: this does support controlling multiple backlights, but some work
+   will need to be done to get the output <-> backlight device mapping
+
+The above assumes both panels will require the same backlight interface type.
+Things will break on systems with multiple panels where the 2 panels need
+a different type of control. E.g. one panel needs ACPI video backlight control,
+where as the other is using native backlight control. Currently in this case
+only one of the 2 required backlight devices will get registered, based on
+the acpi_video_get_backlight_type() return value.
+
+If this (theoretical) case ever shows up, then supporting this will need some
+work. A possible solution here would be to pass a device and connector-name
+to acpi_video_get_backlight_type() so that it can deal with this.
+
+Note in a way we already have a case where userspace sees 2 panels,
+in dual GPU laptop setups with a mux. On those systems we may see
+either 2 native backlight devices; or 2 native backlight devices.
+
+Userspace already has code to deal with this by detecting if the related
+panel is active (iow which way the mux between the GPU and the panels
+points) and then uses that backlight device. Userspace here very much
+assumes a single panel though. It picks only 1 of the 2 backlight devices
+and then only uses that one.
+
+Note that all userspace code (that I know off) is currently hardcoded
+to assume a single panel.
+
+Before the recent changes to not register multiple (e.g. video + native)
+/sys/class/backlight devices for a single panel (on a single GPU laptop),
+userspace would see multiple backlight devices all controlling the same
+backlight.
+
+To deal with this userspace had to always picks one preferred device under
+/sys/class/backlight and will ignore the others. So to support brightness
+control on multiple panels userspace will need to be updated too.
+
+There are plans to allow brightness control through the KMS API by adding
+a "display brightness" property to drm_connector objects for panels. This
+solves a number of issues with the /sys/class/backlight API, including not
+being able to map a sysfs backlight device to a specific connector. Any
+userspace changes to add support for brightness control on devices with
+multiple panels really should build on top of this new KMS property.
+
+Contact: Hans de Goede
+
+Level: Advanced
+
 Outside DRM
 ===========
 
-- 
2.37.2