Re: [PATCH v2 4/5] drm: Add and export function drm_gem_cma_sync_data

[Paul Cercueil <paul@crapouillou.net>]

Hi Thomas,

Le lun. 15 mars 2021 à 8:43, Thomas Zimmermann <tzimmermann@suse.de> a 
écrit :
> Hi
> 
> Am 11.03.21 um 13:33 schrieb Paul Cercueil:
>> 
>> 
>> Le jeu. 11 mars 2021 à 12:28, Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> 
>> a \x7fécrit :
>>> On Sun, Mar 07, 2021 at 08:28:34PM +0000, Paul Cercueil wrote:
>>>>  +    drm_atomic_for_each_plane_damage(&iter, &clip) {
>>>>  +        for (i = 0; i < finfo->num_planes; i++) {
>>>>  +            daddr = drm_fb_cma_get_gem_addr(state->fb, state, i);
>>>>  +
>>>>  +            /* Ignore x1/x2 values, invalidate complete lines */
>>>>  +            offset = clip.y1 * state->fb->pitches[i];
>>>>  +
>>>>  +            dma_sync_single_for_device(dev, daddr + offset,
>>>>  +                       (clip.y2 - clip.y1) * 
>>>> state->fb->pitches[i],
>>>>  +                       DMA_TO_DEVICE);
>>> 
>>> Are these helpers only ever used to transfer data to the device and
>>> never from it?  If so please clearly document that.
>> 
>> Yes. In the DRM world, are there cases where we transfer data from 
>> the \x7fdevice? I assume these cases are handled by v4l2 instead.
> 
> Software rendering (i.e., anything wrt dumb buffers) likely reads 
> back framebuffer content during blit operations. For devices where 
> this is a slow operation (e.g., PCI read) we set struct 
> drm_mode_config.prefer_shadow to hint renderers to use shadow 
> buffering.

This has been brought up a few times already. I answered that in the 
cover letter. In my case, *writes* (e.g. dumb memcpy) are also slower 
with a write-combine buffer than with a non-coherent buffer + cache 
sync. So a shadow buffer does nothing for me.

Cheers,
-Paul