[Mesa-dev] Linux Graphics Next: Userspace submission update

[Daniel Stone]

Hi Christian,

On Tue, 1 Jun 2021 at 13:51, Christian König
<ckoenig.leichtzumerken at gmail.com> wrote:
> Am 01.06.21 um 14:30 schrieb Daniel Vetter:
> > If you want to enable this use-case with driver magic and without the
> > compositor being aware of what's going on, the solution is EGLStreams.
> > Not sure we want to go there, but it's definitely a lot more feasible
> > than trying to stuff eglstreams semantics into dma-buf implicit
> > fencing support in a desperate attempt to not change compositors.
>
> Well not changing compositors is certainly not something I would try
> with this use case.
>
> Not changing compositors is more like ok we have Ubuntu 20.04 and need
> to support that we the newest hardware generation.

Serious question, have you talked to Canonical?

I mean there's a hell of a lot of effort being expended here, but it
seems to all be predicated on the assumption that Ubuntu's LTS
HWE/backport policy is totally immutable, and that we might need to
make the kernel do backflips to work around that. But ... is it? Has
anyone actually asked them how they feel about this?

I mean, my answer to the first email is 'no, absolutely not' from the
technical perspective (the initial proposal totally breaks current and
future userspace), from a design perspective (it breaks a lot of
usecases which aren't single-vendor GPU+display+codec, or aren't just
a simple desktop), and from a sustainability perspective (cutting
Android adrift again isn't acceptable collateral damage to make it
easier to backport things to last year's Ubuntu release).

But then again, I don't even know what I'm NAKing here ... ? The
original email just lists a proposal to break a ton of things, with
proposed replacements which aren't technically viable, and it's not
clear why? Can we please have some more details and some reasoning
behind them?

I don't mind that userspace (compositor, protocols, clients like Mesa
as well as codec APIs) need to do a lot of work to support the new
model. I do really care though that the hard-binary-switch model works
fine enough for AMD but totally breaks heterogeneous systems and makes
it impossible for userspace to do the right thing.

Cheers,
Daniel