Re: [Linaro-mm-sig] Re: DMA-buf and uncached system memory

From: Christian König
Date: Wed Jun 22 2022 - 05:05:35 EST


Am 21.06.22 um 17:42 schrieb Nicolas Dufresne:
Hi Christian and Andy,

Le mardi 21 juin 2022 à 12:34 +0200, Christian König a écrit :
 Hi Andy,
 Am 21.06.22 um 12:17 schrieb Andy.Hsieh:
On 2/16/21 4:39 AM, Nicolas Dufresne wrote:
Le lundi 15 février 2021 à 09:58 +0100, Christian König a écrit :
Hi guys,

we are currently working an Freesync and direct scan out from system
memory on AMD APUs in A+A laptops.

On problem we stumbled over is that our display hardware needs to scan
out from uncached system memory and we currently don't have a way to
communicate that through DMA-buf.

For our specific use case at hand we are going to implement something
driver specific, but the question is should we have something more
generic for this?
Hopefully I'm getting this right, but this makes me think of a long
standing
issue I've met with Intel DRM and UVC driver. If I let the UVC driver
allocate
the buffer, and import the resulting DMABuf (cacheable memory written with
a cpu
copy in the kernel) into DRM, we can see cache artifact being displayed.
While
if I use the DRM driver memory (dumb buffer in that case) it's clean
because
there is a driver specific solution to that.

There is no obvious way for userspace application to know what's is
right/wrong
way and in fact it feels like the kernel could solve this somehow without
having
to inform userspace (perhaps).

After all the system memory access pattern is a PCIe extension and as
such something generic.

Regards,
Christian.

Hi All,

We also encountered the UVC cache issue on ARMv8 CPU in Mediatek SoC when
using UVC dmabuf-export and feeding the dmabuf to the DRM display by the
following GStreamer command:

# gst-launch-1.0 v4l2src device=/dev/video0 io-mode=dmabuf ! kmssink

UVC driver uses videobuf2-vmalloc to allocate buffers and is able to export
them as dmabuf. But UVC uses memcpy() to fill the frame buffer by CPU
without
flushing the cache. So if the display hardware directly uses the buffer, the
image shown on the screen will be dirty.

Here are some experiments:

1. By doing some memory operations (e.g. devmem) when streaming the UVC,
   the issue is mitigated. I guess the cache is swapped rapidly.
2. By replacing the memcpy() with memcpy_flushcache() in the UVC driver,
   the issue disappears.
3. By adding .finish callback in videobuf2-vmalloc.c to flush the cache
   before returning the buffer, the issue disappears.

It seems to lack a cache flush stage in either UVC or Display. We may also
need communication between the producer and consumer. Then, they can decide
who is responsible for the flushing to avoid flushing cache unconditionally
leading to the performance impact.
 Well, that's not what this mail thread was all about.
 The issue you are facing is that somebody is forgetting to flush caches, but
the issue discussed in this thread here is that we have hardware which
bypasses caches altogether.
 As far as I can see in your case UVC just allocates normal cached system
memory through videobuf2-vmalloc() and it is perfectly valid to fill that
using memcpy().
 If some hardware then accesses those buffers bypassing CPU caches then it is
the responsibility of the importing driver and/or DMA subsystem to flush the
caches accordingly.
I've tracked this down to videobuf2-vmalloc.c failing to look for coherency
during "attach()". It is also missing begin_/end access implementation for the
case it get attached to a non-coherent device. Seems fixable though, but "I'm
far from an expert", but more some random person reading code and comments.

Well that is perfectly expected behavior, videobuf2-vmalloc return normal cached system memory.

So it doesn't care for the coherency of the buffer.

What should happen instead is that the display device needs to make sure that it can coherently access the data and that's not the case here.

Regards,
Christian.


regards,
Nicolas

 Regards,
 Christian.
Regards,
Andy Hsieh

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