Introduction and updates from NVIDIA

[Andy Ritger]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 09:52:21PM +0000, Daniel Stone wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 22 March 2016 at 21:43, Daniel Vetter <daniel at ffwll.ch> wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 01:49:59PM +0000, Daniel Stone wrote:
[...]
> >> I think it's been good to have this series to push the discussion
> >> further in more concrete terms, but unfortunately I have to say that
> >> I'm even less convinced now than I have ever been. Sorry.
> >
> > Well the thing that irks me is that this isn't aiming to build a common
> > platform. There's definitely issues with gbm/gralloc+kms+egl in upstream
> > repos, and vendors have hacked around those in all kinds of horrible ways.
> > But trying to fix this mess with yet another vendor-private solution just
> > doesn't help. Instead we need to fix what is there, for everyone, instead
> > of fragmenting more.
> 
> Agreed. One of the things I've been incredibly happy with is how our
> platform has managed to stay completely generic and vendor-neutral so
> far, and I'd love to preserve that.

I don't think you'll find any disagreement to that from NVIDIA, either.

I apologize if the EGLStreams proposal gave the impression of a
vendor-private solution.  That wasn't the intent.  The EGLStream family
of extensions are, after all, an open specification that any EGL vendor
can implement.  If there are aspects of any of these EGL extensions that
seem useful, I'd hope that Mesa would we willing to adopt them.

We (NVIDIA) clearly think EGLStreams is a good direction for expressing
buffer sharing semantics.  In our ideal world, everyone would implement
these extensions and Wayland compositors would migrate to using them as
the generic vendor-neutral mechanism for buffer sharing :)

But, I'm also happy discuss ways to incrementally improve gbm.  I tried
to address Daniel (Stone)'s questions about NVIDIA's gbm concerns.  For this:

> There's definitely issues with gbm/gralloc+kms+egl in upstream
> repos, and vendors have hacked around those in all kinds of horrible ways.

Some examples were given earlier in this thread.  What are some of the
other horrible hacks drivers have had to use today with gbm?

Thanks,
- Andy