Re: [PATCH v6 09/10] arm64: efi: Export screen_info

[Nikhil Mahale]

On 5/13/20 7:56 PM, Nikhil Mahale wrote:
> On 3/20/20 3:16 AM, Michael Kelley wrote:
>> From: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday, March 18, 2020 2:27 AM
>>>
>>> On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 1:18 AM Michael Kelley <mikelley@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>> From: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx>
>>>>> On Sat, Mar 14, 2020 at 4:36 PM Michael Kelley <mikelley@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The Hyper-V frame buffer driver may be built as a module, and
>>>>>> it needs access to screen_info. So export screen_info.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Signed-off-by: Michael Kelley <mikelley@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>>>>>
>>>>> Is there any chance of using a more modern KMS based driver for the screen
>>>>> than the old fbdev subsystem? I had hoped to one day completely remove
>>>>> support for the old CONFIG_VIDEO_FBDEV and screen_info from modern
>>>>> architectures.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> The current hyperv_fb.c driver is all we have today for the synthetic Hyper-V
>>>> frame buffer device.  That driver builds and runs on both ARM64 and x86.
>>>>
>>>> I'm not knowledgeable about video/graphics drivers, but when you
>>>> say "a more modern KMS based driver", are you meaning one based on
>>>> DRM & KMS?  Does DRM make sense for a "dumb" frame buffer device?
>>>> Are there any drivers that would be a good pattern to look at?
>>>
>>> It used to be a lot harder to write a DRM driver compared to an fbdev
>>> driver, but this has changed to the opposite over the years.
>>>
>>> A fairly minimal example would be drivers/gpu/drm/pl111/pl111_drv.c
>>> or anything in drivers/gpu/drm/tiny/, but you may want to look at the
>>> other hypervisor platforms first, i.e drivers/gpu/drm/virtio/virtgpu_drv.c,
>>> drivers/gpu/drm/vmwgfx/vmwgfx_drv.c, drivers/gpu/drm/xen/xen_drm_front.c,
>>> drivers/gpu/drm/qxl/qxl_drv.c, and drivers/gpu/drm/bochs/bochs_drv.c.
>>>
>>
>> Thanks for the pointers, especially for the other hypervisors.
>>
> Sorry if anybody in 'to' or 'cc' is receiving this reply multiple times.
> I had configured by email client incorrectly to reply.
> 
> screen_info is still useful with a modern KMS-based driver.  It exposes
> the mode parameters that the GOP driver chose.  This information is
> needed to implement seamless or glitchless boot, by both ensuring that
> the scanout parameters don't change and being able to read back the
> scanout image to populate the initial contents of the new surface.
> 
> This works today on arches which implement (U)EFI and export
> screen_info, including x86 and powerpc, but doesn't work on arm or
> arm64.  As arm64 systems that implement UEFI with real GOP drivers
> become more prevalent, it would be nice to be have these features there
> as well.

In addition to this, even if a driver doesn't implement a framebuffer
console, or if it does but has an option to disable it, the driver still
needs to know whether the EFI console is using resources on the GPU so
it can avoid clobbering them. For example screen_info provides information
like offset and size of EFI console, using this information driver can
reserve memory used by console and prevent corruption on it.

I think arm64 should export screen_info.

> Thanks,
> Nikhil Mahale
> 
>> Michael
>>