[Nouveau] [RFC] Documentation: nouveau: Introduce some nouveau documentation

[Ilia Mirkin]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 9:06 AM Roy Spliet <nouveau at spliet.org> wrote:
>
>
> Op 23-09-2020 om 22:36 schreef Karol Herbst:
> > On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 10:39 PM Jeremy Cline <jcline at redhat.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 09:02:45PM +0200, Karol Herbst wrote:
> >>> On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 6:21 PM Jeremy Cline <jcline at redhat.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> <snip>
> >>
> >>> yeah, I think overall this file is a good idea and being able to get a
> >>> quick overview over the driver is helpful. I think if we focus on the
> >>> user facing things first, like the hwmon or other things users
> >>> generally interact with would be helpful. I think if we start to
> >>> document areas where there are many low hanging fruits, this could
> >>> help random people to start with easier tasks and get more used to the
> >>> driver overall, so I'd probably ignore most of the stuff which really
> >>> requires a fundamental understanding on how things work and focus more
> >>> on vbios parsing (which has annoying interfaces anyway and it might
> >>> make sense to make it more consistent and nicer to use) and/or simple
> >>> code interfacing with the mmio space.
> >>>
> >>
> >> I'll admit to being motivated by entirely selfish reasons. I know
> >> practically nothing about nouveau and I'm the type of person who likes
> >> to keep notes about how things work together, both free form and
> >> structured in-line docs. All that to say, I think focusing on the
> >> "low-hanging fruit" stuff will be very beneficial and I'm happy to do
> >> that, but I'm also interested in documenting everything else I run
> >> across.
> >>
> >
> > yeah, that's fine. I was just giving a suggestion on where the initial
> > focus should be on.
> >
> >>> Eg some users have problems with their fans as they are either always
> >>> ramping up to max, or not running at all... GPUs temperature or power
> >>> consumption is reporting incorrectly... all those things users hit
> >>> regularly, but which isn't really important enough so it just falls
> >>> under the table even if it gets reported.
> >>>
> >>
> >> This does bring up an interesting point about organization and target
> >> audiences. Typically when I'm writing documentation I like to organize
> >> things by target audiences, so we could have a layout like:
> >>
> >> * General Introduction
> >>
> >> * User Guide
> >>      - Overview of supported hardware/features/etc
> >
> > That's best to document in a wiki though. And we had plans to convert
> > the existing old wiki over to gitlab. And maybe It think we really
> > should do that and clean it up while we work on that. It's just a huge
> > project but maybe just starting with whatever you want to do would be
> > fine and after a while nothing is left. Anyway, I think we should
> > discuss this more openly with the others as well. i don't like the
> > current wiki anyway, as only approved developers can change things and
> > with a gitlab wiki we could even take MRs on stuff.
> >
> >>      - Installation
> >
> > well.. I think this can be skipped ;) But still, also belongs more
> > into a wiki. I think what we could cover here is to how to clean up
> > remaining stuff from the blob driver as this is something which comes
> > up quite a lot on IRC though.
> >
> >>      - Configuration (module parameters and such)
> >>      - Troubleshooting
> >
> > that would be cool to have in the wiki as well. Just collecting the
> > most common issue and document it there. Especially if it is on
> > gitlab, users can just do that as well :)
> >
> >>      - Getting Involved (bug reporting, running tests, etc)
> >
> > yeah, and we have some stuff on that on the old wiki already, it's
> > just very outdated and needs updating, which as said above can only be
> > done by developers and developers sadly have other things to do :)
> >
> >>
> >> * Developer Guide
> >>      - Architecture Overview
> >>      - External APIs (include/uapi/drm/nouveau_drm.h, any sysfs stuff)?
> >>      - Internal APIs
> >
> > Right, those things I'd like to see in the kernel tree actually.
> >
> >>      - Debugging and Development Tools
> >>      - Contribution Guide
> >>
> >
> > Those I think belong more into the wiki again. The latter is a bit
> > hard to split as there are kernel guides, but also community and
> > project guides. Mesa does things differently than let's say the
> > kernel. And Nouveau is still in this limbo state being on the old
> > infra, but also on the new one with mesa...
> >
> >> I'm not sure how much stuff people want to keep on the
> >> nouveau.freedesktop.org wiki vs here.
> >>
> >
> > I think the first step actually is to set up a proper nouveau project
> > on gitlab for dealing with issues and the wiki. I would be fine to do
> > that and we can also move the code there late. But maybe let's start
> > with the wiki :)
>
> Risking to turn this into a "let's fix everything in one go" project
> that ends up never getting finished, I just want to make sure that
> everybody is also aware of the documentation generated from Envytools
> [0]. Especially "architecture overview" (that is, if we're talking about
> hardware architecture and not driver/software architecture) might be
> better suited in envytools.
>
> As for module parameters, IMHO modinfo is supposed to be the source of
> information. It's sadly lacking any "sub-"option inside nouveau.config
> and nouveau.debug, which may be by design. Perhaps expanding the modinfo
> explanations can help cover at least all the other options in a way that
> never gets out of sync with source code.

The general idea of envytools was to document NVIDIA GPUs, and to a
lesser extent, some blob details which may not be intrinsic to the
hardware itself. The idea of this patch appears to be documenting how
nouveau works, which is a different and largely unrelated goal. I
think it'd be a bit much to document in great detail the inner
workings of the GPUs in the kernel, I don't think there's precedent
for it, and it's just not the right place for it.

Cheers,

  -ilia