Userspace blit API

Userspace blit API

[Tom Cooksey]

Hi,

I'm a developer working on Qt for Embedded Linux.

We have customers with hardware blitters who want to use them with Qt. 
Currently, this is done by either mmap'ing the device's registers or by adding 
special, device-specific ioctls to their fbdev driver. What would be nice is 
to have a generic blit API as part of fbdev - preferably one we can query to 
ask "Is this kind of blit accelerated?" and drop to pure user-space if it's 
not accelerated. This seems like a pretty common thing to want, which probably 
means there's a very good reason it has not already been implemented. I've 
searched the mailing list archives, Google and Documentation/fb but not found 
a huge amount of information.

Also, how does fbdev fit with the DRM modesetting API? I've had a look at the 
modesetting stuff and it seems to be providing pretty much the same 
functionality?


I apologize if this has been asked & answered before - If it has, would you 
mind digging out a link?


Cheers,

Tom









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Re: Userspace blit API

[Torgeir Veimo]

On 4 Dec 2008, at 18:27, Tom Cooksey wrote:

> I apologize if this has been asked & answered before - If it has,  
> would you
> mind digging out a link?


Have you considered creating or using a DirectFB driver with this  
device, or is that too much overhead?

-- 
Torgeir Veimo
torgeir@pobox.com





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Re: Userspace blit API

[Tom Cooksey]

On Thursday 04 December 2008 09:58:26 ext Torgeir Veimo wrote:
> On 4 Dec 2008, at 18:27, Tom Cooksey wrote:
> > I apologize if this has been asked & answered before - If it has,
> > would you
> > mind digging out a link?
>
> Have you considered creating or using a DirectFB driver with this
> device, or is that too much overhead?

We have a DirectFB driver already and we were hoping that would solve this 
problem. The trouble is, DirectFB seems to have gone beyond it's original 
scope of "accelerated surface management" and is now a bit too big. Our 
customers also report 3rd party drivers (even in-tree drivers in my 
experience) are a bit unstable.

I personally quite like the surface management part of the DirectFB API, it's 
just a shame some of the implementations are letting it down. :-(


Cheers,

Tom



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Re: Userspace blit API

[Dave Airlie]

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 6:27 PM, Tom Cooksey <thomas.cooksey@nokia.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm a developer working on Qt for Embedded Linux.
>
> We have customers with hardware blitters who want to use them with Qt.
> Currently, this is done by either mmap'ing the device's registers or by adding
> special, device-specific ioctls to their fbdev driver. What would be nice is
> to have a generic blit API as part of fbdev - preferably one we can query to
> ask "Is this kind of blit accelerated?" and drop to pure user-space if it's
> not accelerated. This seems like a pretty common thing to want, which probably
> means there's a very good reason it has not already been implemented. I've
> searched the mailing list archives, Google and Documentation/fb but not found
> a huge amount of information.
>
> Also, how does fbdev fit with the DRM modesetting API? I've had a look at the
> modesetting stuff and it seems to be providing pretty much the same
> functionality?

The rule we have for the DRM is the kernel doesn't provide
acceleration, except for a fast
memcpy (using blit hw if necessary) to move buffers in/out of VRAM.

DRM kms is mainly going to provide a modesetting interface that
reflects what modern gpu hw wants.
GPU hw with multiple crtcs and outputs, needs something that fbdev
really can't provide with its interfaces.

What we are planning on with kms is to provide fbdev drivers as part
of the kms drivers, but really for legacy users and to
provide a console.

Things like current directfb accel won't work with these fbdev
drivers, mapping card regs into userspace won't be allowed.

For cards using kms, the DRM will provide a per-driver accel interface
(just like it does now) as many cards just don't provide blit engines
and the like anymore, so even though a generic blit interface might
seem sensible now, cards like the ATI r600, nvidia G80, etc don't have
2D engines so you have to execute 3D state to do a blit.

Dave.

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Re: Userspace blit API

[Tom Cooksey]

On Thursday 04 December 2008 10:03:34 ext Dave Airlie wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 6:27 PM, Tom Cooksey <thomas.cooksey@nokia.com> 
wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm a developer working on Qt for Embedded Linux.
> >
> > We have customers with hardware blitters who want to use them with Qt.
> > Currently, this is done by either mmap'ing the device's registers or by
> > adding special, device-specific ioctls to their fbdev driver. What would
> > be nice is to have a generic blit API as part of fbdev - preferably one
> > we can query to ask "Is this kind of blit accelerated?" and drop to pure
> > user-space if it's not accelerated. This seems like a pretty common thing
> > to want, which probably means there's a very good reason it has not
> > already been implemented. I've searched the mailing list archives, Google
> > and Documentation/fb but not found a huge amount of information.
> >
> > Also, how does fbdev fit with the DRM modesetting API? I've had a look at
> > the modesetting stuff and it seems to be providing pretty much the same
> > functionality?
>
> The rule we have for the DRM is the kernel doesn't provide
> acceleration, except for a fast
> memcpy (using blit hw if necessary) to move buffers in/out of VRAM.

That does make sense from that I've read on the DRI-devel list....

> DRM kms is mainly going to provide a modesetting interface that
> reflects what modern gpu hw wants.
> GPU hw with multiple crtcs and outputs, needs something that fbdev
> really can't provide with its interfaces.

Well, I'd argue that it's not just super-amazing desktop 3D drivers which need 
this. Pretty much all embedded display controllers I've come across in the 
last few years have had at least a TV-out and often support for 2 LCDs. I've 
seen a "Display control" sysfs interface for omap fb hardware which controls 
which /dev/fbx is mapped to which output. I think it even allows multiple 
outputs to share the same fb device and stack several framebuffers on top of 
each other with a global alpha. Seems very similar to the drm modesetting 
interface (apart from the overlay support).


> What we are planning on with kms is to provide fbdev drivers as part
> of the kms drivers, but really for legacy users and to provide a console.

Yup, I've played with this on my laptop with the i915 driver in jbarnes's 
tree. It's quite nice to have /dev/fb0 again :-). Although I see no problem in 
writing a Qt/Embedded driver which uses the libdrm interfaces to map the 
framebuffer directly (something I want to play with anyway). I think it's 
going to be a little more involved than just mmap'ing /dev/fb0, but not too 
much so.


> Things like current directfb accel won't work with these fbdev
> drivers, mapping card regs into userspace won't be allowed.
What are your thoughts on expanding libdrm's scope beyond 3D drivers? I do 
think the modesetting API it provides is useful for embedded hardware too.

I'm basically just lazy - I don't like having to support fbdev, directfb, drm 
(we have customers asking for it) as well as proprietary fbdev extensions for 
one-off devices.

> For cards using kms, the DRM will provide a per-driver accel interface
> (just like it does now) as many cards just don't provide blit engines
> and the like anymore, so even though a generic blit interface might
> seem sensible now, cards like the ATI r600, nvidia G80, etc don't have
> 2D engines so you have to execute 3D state to do a blit.

... Then perhaps it would make sense to add a blit API to libdrm? The 
important bit I want to emphasize is that the entire API would be optional - 
We've learned from experience with XRender that providing an API with software 
fallbacks doesn't work very well. It's better to query "can the device 
accelerate this?" and do something else if it doesn't. So, hardware without a 
blitter will just say "I don't support this, do it yourself". This would apply 
to both high-end 3d chips which lack a blitter and to the ultra low-end 
framebuffer only chips. Plus, if it's exposed via libdrm, the device-specific 
part of the library could fire-up the 3d core to do the blit in userspace 
(well, assemble the command buffer in usespace anyway). Although to be honest, 
I'd expect people will want a 3d-composited UI if there's 3d available.


I'm also not sure how video overlays play into this. Using the v4l API to 
accelerate video on top of fbdev seems odd. I think even ultra-high end mobile 
hardware will always have overlay hardware simply because it uses less power 
than the 3D core (I could be wrong about that though!).



Cheers,

Tom



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Re: Userspace blit API

[Torgeir Veimo]

On 4 Dec 2008, at 20:41, Tom Cooksey wrote:

>> Things like current directfb accel won't work with these fbdev
>> drivers, mapping card regs into userspace won't be allowed.


So directfb would need to use the dri api in order to work with those  
fbdev drivers?

-- 
Torgeir Veimo
torgeir@pobox.com





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Re: Userspace blit API

[Tom Cooksey]

On Thursday 04 December 2008 11:43:55 ext Torgeir Veimo wrote:
> On 4 Dec 2008, at 20:41, Tom Cooksey wrote:
> >> Things like current directfb accel won't work with these fbdev
> >> drivers, mapping card regs into userspace won't be allowed.
>
> So directfb would need to use the dri api in order to work with those
> fbdev drivers?

No, I think DirectFB can just work on the fbdev interface they provide - it 
would just have to drop to software fall-backs for everything. However if 
libdrm provided a blit API, it would also be able to use it (maybe X could 
too, not to mention Wayland).





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Re: Userspace blit API

[Alex Deucher]

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 5:41 AM, Tom Cooksey <thomas.cooksey@nokia.com> wrote:
> On Thursday 04 December 2008 10:03:34 ext Dave Airlie wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 6:27 PM, Tom Cooksey <thomas.cooksey@nokia.com>
> wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > I'm a developer working on Qt for Embedded Linux.
>> >
>> > We have customers with hardware blitters who want to use them with Qt.
>> > Currently, this is done by either mmap'ing the device's registers or by
>> > adding special, device-specific ioctls to their fbdev driver. What would
>> > be nice is to have a generic blit API as part of fbdev - preferably one
>> > we can query to ask "Is this kind of blit accelerated?" and drop to pure
>> > user-space if it's not accelerated. This seems like a pretty common thing
>> > to want, which probably means there's a very good reason it has not
>> > already been implemented. I've searched the mailing list archives, Google
>> > and Documentation/fb but not found a huge amount of information.
>> >
>> > Also, how does fbdev fit with the DRM modesetting API? I've had a look at
>> > the modesetting stuff and it seems to be providing pretty much the same
>> > functionality?
>>
>> The rule we have for the DRM is the kernel doesn't provide
>> acceleration, except for a fast
>> memcpy (using blit hw if necessary) to move buffers in/out of VRAM.
>
> That does make sense from that I've read on the DRI-devel list....
>
>> DRM kms is mainly going to provide a modesetting interface that
>> reflects what modern gpu hw wants.
>> GPU hw with multiple crtcs and outputs, needs something that fbdev
>> really can't provide with its interfaces.
>
> Well, I'd argue that it's not just super-amazing desktop 3D drivers which need
> this. Pretty much all embedded display controllers I've come across in the
> last few years have had at least a TV-out and often support for 2 LCDs. I've
> seen a "Display control" sysfs interface for omap fb hardware which controls
> which /dev/fbx is mapped to which output. I think it even allows multiple
> outputs to share the same fb device and stack several framebuffers on top of
> each other with a global alpha. Seems very similar to the drm modesetting
> interface (apart from the overlay support).

Ideally they'd eventually provide a drm kms interface.

>
>
>> What we are planning on with kms is to provide fbdev drivers as part
>> of the kms drivers, but really for legacy users and to provide a console.
>
> Yup, I've played with this on my laptop with the i915 driver in jbarnes's
> tree. It's quite nice to have /dev/fb0 again :-). Although I see no problem in
> writing a Qt/Embedded driver which uses the libdrm interfaces to map the
> framebuffer directly (something I want to play with anyway). I think it's
> going to be a little more involved than just mmap'ing /dev/fb0, but not too
> much so.
>
>
>> Things like current directfb accel won't work with these fbdev
>> drivers, mapping card regs into userspace won't be allowed.
> What are your thoughts on expanding libdrm's scope beyond 3D drivers? I do
> think the modesetting API it provides is useful for embedded hardware too.
>
> I'm basically just lazy - I don't like having to support fbdev, directfb, drm
> (we have customers asking for it) as well as proprietary fbdev extensions for
> one-off devices.
>
>> For cards using kms, the DRM will provide a per-driver accel interface
>> (just like it does now) as many cards just don't provide blit engines
>> and the like anymore, so even though a generic blit interface might
>> seem sensible now, cards like the ATI r600, nvidia G80, etc don't have
>> 2D engines so you have to execute 3D state to do a blit.
>
> ... Then perhaps it would make sense to add a blit API to libdrm? The
> important bit I want to emphasize is that the entire API would be optional -
> We've learned from experience with XRender that providing an API with software
> fallbacks doesn't work very well. It's better to query "can the device
> accelerate this?" and do something else if it doesn't. So, hardware without a
> blitter will just say "I don't support this, do it yourself". This would apply
> to both high-end 3d chips which lack a blitter and to the ultra low-end
> framebuffer only chips. Plus, if it's exposed via libdrm, the device-specific
> part of the library could fire-up the 3d core to do the blit in userspace
> (well, assemble the command buffer in usespace anyway). Although to be honest,
> I'd expect people will want a 3d-composited UI if there's 3d available.
>
>
> I'm also not sure how video overlays play into this. Using the v4l API to
> accelerate video on top of fbdev seems odd. I think even ultra-high end mobile
> hardware will always have overlay hardware simply because it uses less power
> than the 3D core (I could be wrong about that though!).

Just like acceleration.  You'd built a command buffer or mmio list in
your usersapce accel driver and submit it to the drm just like you
would for 2D or 3D.  Since the the kms drm is no longer tied directly
to X, you can use the modesetting api directly and a separate lib for
accel.  Create a userspace blit or overlay lib with drm backends for
various hw that builds command packets if you don't want to use X.

Alex

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Re: Userspace blit API

[Jesse Barnes]

On Thursday, December 4, 2008 6:34 am Alex Deucher wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 5:41 AM, Tom Cooksey <thomas.cooksey@nokia.com> 
wrote:
> > On Thursday 04 December 2008 10:03:34 ext Dave Airlie wrote:
> >> On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 6:27 PM, Tom Cooksey <thomas.cooksey@nokia.com>
> >
> > wrote:
> >> > Hi,
> >> >
> >> > I'm a developer working on Qt for Embedded Linux.
> >> >
> >> > We have customers with hardware blitters who want to use them with Qt.
> >> > Currently, this is done by either mmap'ing the device's registers or
> >> > by adding special, device-specific ioctls to their fbdev driver. What
> >> > would be nice is to have a generic blit API as part of fbdev -
> >> > preferably one we can query to ask "Is this kind of blit accelerated?"
> >> > and drop to pure user-space if it's not accelerated. This seems like a
> >> > pretty common thing to want, which probably means there's a very good
> >> > reason it has not already been implemented. I've searched the mailing
> >> > list archives, Google and Documentation/fb but not found a huge amount
> >> > of information.
> >> >
> >> > Also, how does fbdev fit with the DRM modesetting API? I've had a look
> >> > at the modesetting stuff and it seems to be providing pretty much the
> >> > same functionality?
> >>
> >> The rule we have for the DRM is the kernel doesn't provide
> >> acceleration, except for a fast
> >> memcpy (using blit hw if necessary) to move buffers in/out of VRAM.
> >
> > That does make sense from that I've read on the DRI-devel list....
> >
> >> DRM kms is mainly going to provide a modesetting interface that
> >> reflects what modern gpu hw wants.
> >> GPU hw with multiple crtcs and outputs, needs something that fbdev
> >> really can't provide with its interfaces.
> >
> > Well, I'd argue that it's not just super-amazing desktop 3D drivers which
> > need this. Pretty much all embedded display controllers I've come across
> > in the last few years have had at least a TV-out and often support for 2
> > LCDs. I've seen a "Display control" sysfs interface for omap fb hardware
> > which controls which /dev/fbx is mapped to which output. I think it even
> > allows multiple outputs to share the same fb device and stack several
> > framebuffers on top of each other with a global alpha. Seems very similar
> > to the drm modesetting interface (apart from the overlay support).
>
> Ideally they'd eventually provide a drm kms interface.
>
> >> What we are planning on with kms is to provide fbdev drivers as part
> >> of the kms drivers, but really for legacy users and to provide a
> >> console.
> >
> > Yup, I've played with this on my laptop with the i915 driver in jbarnes's
> > tree. It's quite nice to have /dev/fb0 again :-). Although I see no
> > problem in writing a Qt/Embedded driver which uses the libdrm interfaces
> > to map the framebuffer directly (something I want to play with anyway). I
> > think it's going to be a little more involved than just mmap'ing
> > /dev/fb0, but not too much so.
> >
> >> Things like current directfb accel won't work with these fbdev
> >> drivers, mapping card regs into userspace won't be allowed.
> >
> > What are your thoughts on expanding libdrm's scope beyond 3D drivers? I
> > do think the modesetting API it provides is useful for embedded hardware
> > too.
> >
> > I'm basically just lazy - I don't like having to support fbdev, directfb,
> > drm (we have customers asking for it) as well as proprietary fbdev
> > extensions for one-off devices.
> >
> >> For cards using kms, the DRM will provide a per-driver accel interface
> >> (just like it does now) as many cards just don't provide blit engines
> >> and the like anymore, so even though a generic blit interface might
> >> seem sensible now, cards like the ATI r600, nvidia G80, etc don't have
> >> 2D engines so you have to execute 3D state to do a blit.
> >
> > ... Then perhaps it would make sense to add a blit API to libdrm? The
> > important bit I want to emphasize is that the entire API would be
> > optional - We've learned from experience with XRender that providing an
> > API with software fallbacks doesn't work very well. It's better to query
> > "can the device accelerate this?" and do something else if it doesn't.
> > So, hardware without a blitter will just say "I don't support this, do it
> > yourself". This would apply to both high-end 3d chips which lack a
> > blitter and to the ultra low-end framebuffer only chips. Plus, if it's
> > exposed via libdrm, the device-specific part of the library could fire-up
> > the 3d core to do the blit in userspace (well, assemble the command
> > buffer in usespace anyway). Although to be honest, I'd expect people will
> > want a 3d-composited UI if there's 3d available.
> >
> >
> > I'm also not sure how video overlays play into this. Using the v4l API to
> > accelerate video on top of fbdev seems odd. I think even ultra-high end
> > mobile hardware will always have overlay hardware simply because it uses
> > less power than the 3D core (I could be wrong about that though!).
>
> Just like acceleration.  You'd built a command buffer or mmio list in
> your usersapce accel driver and submit it to the drm just like you
> would for 2D or 3D.  Since the the kms drm is no longer tied directly
> to X, you can use the modesetting api directly and a separate lib for
> accel.  Create a userspace blit or overlay lib with drm backends for
> various hw that builds command packets if you don't want to use X.

The other great thing KMS gives you over fb is integration with the DRM based 
memory manager.  That means all your clients, be they video, 2D or 3D can 
allocate memory from the same pool, pass handles back and forth for zero copy 
texturing for example, and generally not stomp on one another.

I definitely agree that it's useful outside the high end 3D space, but so far 
we only have DRM KMS drivers for Intel and ATI; no one's done VIA or any other 
chip yet afaik.  I'll be adding some documentation for the external and 
internal interfaces next week (now that Eric pulled the base bits into his 
tree, yay!), that might help people get started.

-- 
Jesse Barnes, Intel Open Source Technology Center


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