[Mesa-dev] Gallium proposal: add a user pointer in pipe_resource

[Keith Whitwell]

On Sat, 2011-01-29 at 15:12 -0800, Marek Olšák wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I am proposing to add a pointer to a user buffer in pipe_resource.
> There are two reasons for this:
> 
> 1) I would like to have a way to query outside of a driver whether a
> buffer is a user buffer. Simply comparing the pointer with NULL would
> do the trick.
> 
> 2) I would like to efficiently obtain a pointer to a user buffer
> outside of a driver without going through the sequence of functions
> get_transfer, transfer_map, transfer_unmap, and transfer_destroy.
> 
> This will allow to move more driver-specific code to auxiliary/util.
> 
> 


Marek,

I have to say my preference would have been to see user buffers fade
away in favour of things like inline transfers.  That said you're much
more active than I am in looking at this right now, so I don't want to
get in the way of your progress.

I guess my biggest problem with user buffers is how poorly defined their
semantics are.  For instance, what does it really mean to get write
transfer into a userbuffer?   Will you be updating the original
application-owned memory?

And user-buffers tend not to stay user-buffers - they can be promoted to
regular buffers behind the scenes by the driver.  Would that be
reflected in this interface somehow?