Re: [PATCH v2 1/2] drm/shmem: add support for per object caching attributes

[Daniel Vetter]

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 02:18:30PM +0100, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>   Hi,
> 
> > btw on why udl does this: Imported bo are usually rendered by real hw, and
> > reading it uncached/wc is the more defensive setting. It would be kinda
> > nice if dma-buf would expose this, but I fear dma-api maintainers would
> > murder us if we even just propose that ... so it's a mess right now.
> 
> I suspect for imported dma-bufs we should leave the mmap() to the
> exporter instead of pulling the pages out of the sgt and map them
> ourself.

Uh yes. If we still do that, then yes very much we shouldn't. Even better
would be to just not do that, because the semantics of dumb gem mmap and
dma-buf mmap differ (the latter has the begin/end access ioctl).

If we can't ditch the mmap I think we should at least improve the helpers
to do the redirect to dma_buf_mmap directly and stop drivers from doing
silly stuff.

> > btw the issue extends to dma access by devices too, e.g. both i915 and
> > amdgpu can select the coherency mode at runtime (using e.g. the pcie
> > no-snoop transaction mode), and we have similar uncoordinated hacks in
> > there too, like in udl.
> 
> Hmm.  Ok.  I guess I'm not going to try solve all that properly just for
> the little virtio fix.
> 
> Just curious:  How do you tell your hardware?  Are there bits for that
> in the gtt, simliar to the caching bits in the x86 page tables?

Brace for contact ...

- on amdgpu it's a bit in the gpu pagetable. I think (but not sure, not an
  expert on these chips) that's the only way.

- on i915 it's a also a bit in the gpu pagetables, but userspace can
  override the caching/coherency mode on a per-texture/render target/*BO
  level in the command stream.

This is why gpus and dma-api don't mix well, since dma-api's goal is to
hide all this even from the driver. gpus otoh leak it all the way to
userspace. The trouble is as old as AGP from 1999 or so, I've become
somewhat cynic at trying to fix this for real and not just with hacks. The
disconnect between what we need and what dma-api kernel people want to
give us is too big to bridge it seems.
-Daniel
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
http://blog.ffwll.ch