Re: [RFC] drm/fourcc: Add a modifier for contiguous memory

[Daniel Stone]

Hi Randy,

On Tue, 29 Nov 2022 at 10:11, Hsia-Jun Li <randy.li@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Currently, we assume all the pixel formats are multiple planes, devices
> could support each component has its own memory plane.
> But that may not apply for any device in the world. We could have a
> device without IOMMU then this is not impossible.
>
> Besides, when we export an handle through the PRIME, the upstream
> device(likes a capture card or camera) may not support non-contiguous
> memory. It would be better to allocate the handle in contiguous memory
> at the first time.
>
> We may think the memory allocation is done in user space, we could do
> the trick there. But the dumb_create() sometimes is not the right API
> for that.
>
> "Note that userspace is not allowed to use such objects for render
> acceleration - drivers must create their own private ioctls for such a
> use case."
> "Note that dumb objects may not be used for gpu acceleration, as has
> been attempted on some ARM embedded platforms. Such drivers really must
> have a hardware-specific ioctl to allocate suitable buffer objects."
>
> We need to relay on those device custom APIs then. It would be helpful
> for their library to calculate the right size for contiguous memory. It
> would be useful for the driver supports rendering dumb buffer as well.

As a buffer can only have a single modifier, this isn't practical.
Contiguous needs to be negotiated separately and out of band. See e.g.
dma-heaps for this.

Cheers,
Daniel