Re: [PATCH v5 0/3] Add "link bpc" DRM property

[Harry Wentland]

On 2026-04-01 04:40, Daniel Stone wrote:
> Hi Harry,
> 
> On Tue, 31 Mar 2026 at 18:47, Harry Wentland <harry.wentland@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On 2026-03-31 08:50, Pekka Paalanen wrote:
>>> People who care about the picture quality down to these levels will
>>> likely want to know and learn about these techniques. They may also
>>> want to explicitly control them.
>>>
>>> In time, when these have been used enough in the wild, compositor
>>> developers will learn what makes a difference and what does not, so
>>> they will adjust their reporting to end users. The most important thing
>>> for the kernel is it offer an unambiguous and stable UAPI for these.
>>>
>>> Policy belongs in userspace.
>>
>> I don't like this as a blanket statement. There is a lot of policy that
>> intersects with HW nuances, whether it comes to power or otherwise.
>> Taking away driver vendor's abilities to optimize will hurt the Linux
>> ecosystem in the long run.
>>
>> IMO this needs to be evaluated on a case by case basis. There are
>> many places where it does make sense to give userspace a greater
>> say on policy, but we don't want to push driver (HW specific) logic
>> up into userspace.
> 
> It's not something that's _just_ specific to a particular
> display-controller manufacturer or a particular IP generation though.
> It very much depends on the usecase.
> 
> If you have a laptop and you're trying to give a presentation,
> applying dithering and/or DSC makes a lot of sense: you don't want
> your battery to die, and the projector's probably going to obliterate
> half the colour anyway, so might as well as go for the most efficient
> thing.
> 
> If your laptop is plugged into your big display at home to write code,
> applying DSC to cram the highest possible resolution + refresh in
> would make sense. But if dithering only results in a marginal power
> saving, and your laptop is charging anyway - why bother degrading
> visual acuity?
> 
> If you're a media player, then you're in a good position to know what
> would be good to go over the wire, because you know (& are possibly in
> control of) the format over what comes in in the first place.
> 
> But everyone's tradeoffs are different, which is why sometimes the
> best choice is to ultimately leave it up to the user. If you dig into
> any media playback device (STBs running Android TV, Apple TV, Fire TV,
> et al), you'll see that all of them ultimately allow overrides for bpc
> / colour model / subsampling / etc. Those aren't just there for fun,
> but because they are usable to real people, and it's not possible for
> Amlogic or MediaTek or Rockchip or whoever to statically decide that a
> certain configuration is going to be best everywhere.
> 
> Right now we have drivers making magic per-vendor/SKU decisions,
> without even so much as a feedback mechanism to userspace (unless you
> count debugfs, maybe) so it can even figure out what's going on, let
> alone control it. To properly support some of those usecases,
> userspace needs to be able to control what goes out on the wire, but
> as a first step, it just wants to be informed of what the driver even
> did with the properties we gave it.
> 
> The end game of this isn't Weston logging something to stdout, it's to
> surface things to userspace so it can guide the kernel into making a
> good decision for usecases that may not be ones the silicon vendor
> decided was 'probably the best thing' however many years ago.
> 

I agree with you.

But I wanted to respond to the statement that "policy belongs in
userspace" and add a bit more nuance. It depends on the use-case
and in any case, it's important drivers have the ability to set a
good default policy for a given HW.

We're still missing a lot of toggles to allow userspace to select a
desired policy and I'm sure we'll be able to add those where needed
but I agree with Michel and Ville that we need to get the end-to-end
implementation right.

Harry

> Cheers,
> Daniel