[Mesa-dev] RFC: enforcing gallium resource bind flags

[Jose Fonseca]

----- Original Message -----
> On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 12:31 AM, Roland Scheidegger <sroland at vmware.com>
> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > there is some sloppy usage of bind flags in the opengl state tracker
> > (that is, resources get used for things which they didn't have the bind
> > flag set).
> > We'd really like to enforce these flags to be honored but it doesn't
> > really work (ok llvmpipe so far would only really care about sampler
> > view, color render target, depth/stencil - see also
> > c8eb2d0e829d0d2aea6a982620da0d3cfb5982e2).
> >
> > Currently it looks like there's at least two issues with those bind
> > flags in the opengl state tracker (for these bind flags only, there are
> > almost certainly more).
> > 1) for textures, the state tracker will always try to allocate resources
> > with both sampler_view and render_target (or depth/stencil) bind flags.
> > However it will drop these flags for resources where this isn't
> > supported. This is all right, however when we try to render to such
> > resources, the surface will be created regardless (but it won't get used
> > as it will fail framebuffer validation which checks the attachments and
> > specifically tests if the format is a renderable format). I guess this
> > could be fixed (seems a bit backward, it might be possible to just look
> > at the resource bind flags to decide if we create a surface or not, and
> > we shouldn't need to check the format later - if we've got the bind flag
> > we know we can create a surface and hence render to).
> >
> > 2) a far more difficult problem seem to be buffers. While piglit doesn't
> > hit it (I modified the tbo test to hit this) it is possible to create
> > buffers with any target and later bind to anything. So the state tracker
> > has no knowledge at all what a buffer will eventually get used for
> > (other than the hint when it was first created), and it seems
> > unreasonable to just set all possible bind flags all the time. But then
> > still enforcing bind flags later would require the state tracker to
> > recreate the resource (with more bind flags) and copy over the old
> > contents, which sounds very bad too.
> >
> > So any ideas?
> 
> In my opinion, the bind flags are useless, because they cannot be
> determined for OpenGL resources exactly. The only exceptions are:
> - PIPE_BIND_CONSTANT_BUFFER, which is set correctly for the default
> non-UBO constant buffer.
> - PIPE_BIND_SCANOUT for the DDX and DRM state trackers.
> - PIPE_BIND_GLOBAL for OpenCL.
> 
> The radeon drivers ignore the bind flags entirely except SCANOUT and
> GLOBAL, and r300g also checks for CONSTANT_BUFFER.
> 
> The OpenGL buffer API doesn't have any bind flags. It only has binding
> points, and any buffer can be bound to any binding point. Textures are
> just as fun. You can create a texture or a renderbuffer, but if you
> use CopyTexSubImage, the roles are swapped - what was a texture is
> suddenly a renderbuffer and what was a renderbuffer is suddenly a
> texture.
> 
> If we didn't need the 3 bind flags mentioned above, I would be for
> removing pipe_resource::bind, because it's not that useful.

API other than OpenGL have clear and stricter binding rules, which drivers can rely upon to make real optimizations.

I honestly don't see the what's the difficulty here, the semantics are clear:

- If Mesa state tracker doesn't care about BIND flags, that's fine, just let Mesa request as much BIND flags as the driver advertises.

- If a gallium driver doesn't care about BIND flags, that's fine, just advertise ~0 bind flags.

It's really as simple as that. If the state tracker cares about some but not all flags you can easily extrapolate from the above what should be done.

But lets not get carried away and throw the baby with the water. Eliminating bind flags from Gallium does nothing to improve Mesa performance, and will hamper other gallium-based graphics stacks.

Jose