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

Thu Sep 24 17:47:34 UTC 2020

On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 7:26 PM Karol Herbst <kherbst at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 6:03 PM Jeremy Cline <jcline at redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 11:36:54PM +0200, Karol Herbst wrote:
> > > 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.
> > >
> >
> > Yeah, so I think there's going to be at least three separate locations
> > for documentation: Envytools (hardware), the nouveau wiki (user guide),
> > and in the kernel (developer-focused and only the kernel bits). I don't
> > know much about the userspace bits yet, so maybe there's going to be
> > more than three places. I think it'd be good to at least cross-reference
> > between the wiki and the kernel docs, so this "section" could really
> > just be a link to the nouveau wiki for folks who end up in the kernel
> > docs, but really just want to use things (and maybe new developers who
> > haven't historically been users, such as myself).
> >
> > > >     - 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 :)
> > >
> >
> > I've got some experience with GitLab's wiki, and as far as I could tell
> > there wasn't a great way to handle contribution from folks without write
> > access as well as reviews (it may exist, I just don't know it) so what
> > I've done in the past is use GitLab Pages[0] and stored a Sphinx project
> > in the repository so contributions are through normal merge requests. I
> > don't know if gitlab.freedesktop.org has Pages set up, though.
> > Regardless, I'm more than happy to do that work as well.
> >
>
> there might be an easier way. In gitlab you can actually mirror
> repositories. I created https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/nouveau/wiki
> and asked Daniels to set up a mirror against the wiki git repo of the
> same project. If we add some CI pipeline on top we could even verify
> the proposed changes are valid. Maybe that would be good enough...
>
> But yeah.. maybe having a simple pages site would also work.. dunno if
> it actually makes a difference anyway, but that might be more work.
>

mhh, I saw that the pages stuff is already set up, so maybe I just
look into it next week and see what works best.

> > [0] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/
> >
> > - Jeremy
> >