drm-uapi.rst 20 KB

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  1. .. Copyright 2020 DisplayLink (UK) Ltd.
  2. ===================
  3. Userland interfaces
  4. ===================
  5. The DRM core exports several interfaces to applications, generally
  6. intended to be used through corresponding libdrm wrapper functions. In
  7. addition, drivers export device-specific interfaces for use by userspace
  8. drivers & device-aware applications through ioctls and sysfs files.
  9. External interfaces include: memory mapping, context management, DMA
  10. operations, AGP management, vblank control, fence management, memory
  11. management, and output management.
  12. Cover generic ioctls and sysfs layout here. We only need high-level
  13. info, since man pages should cover the rest.
  14. libdrm Device Lookup
  15. ====================
  16. .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_ioctl.c
  17. :doc: getunique and setversion story
  18. .. _drm_primary_node:
  19. Primary Nodes, DRM Master and Authentication
  20. ============================================
  21. .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_auth.c
  22. :doc: master and authentication
  23. .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_auth.c
  24. :export:
  25. .. kernel-doc:: include/drm/drm_auth.h
  26. :internal:
  27. .. _drm_leasing:
  28. DRM Display Resource Leasing
  29. ============================
  30. .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_lease.c
  31. :doc: drm leasing
  32. Open-Source Userspace Requirements
  33. ==================================
  34. The DRM subsystem has stricter requirements than most other kernel subsystems on
  35. what the userspace side for new uAPI needs to look like. This section here
  36. explains what exactly those requirements are, and why they exist.
  37. The short summary is that any addition of DRM uAPI requires corresponding
  38. open-sourced userspace patches, and those patches must be reviewed and ready for
  39. merging into a suitable and canonical upstream project.
  40. GFX devices (both display and render/GPU side) are really complex bits of
  41. hardware, with userspace and kernel by necessity having to work together really
  42. closely. The interfaces, for rendering and modesetting, must be extremely wide
  43. and flexible, and therefore it is almost always impossible to precisely define
  44. them for every possible corner case. This in turn makes it really practically
  45. infeasible to differentiate between behaviour that's required by userspace, and
  46. which must not be changed to avoid regressions, and behaviour which is only an
  47. accidental artifact of the current implementation.
  48. Without access to the full source code of all userspace users that means it
  49. becomes impossible to change the implementation details, since userspace could
  50. depend upon the accidental behaviour of the current implementation in minute
  51. details. And debugging such regressions without access to source code is pretty
  52. much impossible. As a consequence this means:
  53. - The Linux kernel's "no regression" policy holds in practice only for
  54. open-source userspace of the DRM subsystem. DRM developers are perfectly fine
  55. if closed-source blob drivers in userspace use the same uAPI as the open
  56. drivers, but they must do so in the exact same way as the open drivers.
  57. Creative (ab)use of the interfaces will, and in the past routinely has, lead
  58. to breakage.
  59. - Any new userspace interface must have an open-source implementation as
  60. demonstration vehicle.
  61. The other reason for requiring open-source userspace is uAPI review. Since the
  62. kernel and userspace parts of a GFX stack must work together so closely, code
  63. review can only assess whether a new interface achieves its goals by looking at
  64. both sides. Making sure that the interface indeed covers the use-case fully
  65. leads to a few additional requirements:
  66. - The open-source userspace must not be a toy/test application, but the real
  67. thing. Specifically it needs to handle all the usual error and corner cases.
  68. These are often the places where new uAPI falls apart and hence essential to
  69. assess the fitness of a proposed interface.
  70. - The userspace side must be fully reviewed and tested to the standards of that
  71. userspace project. For e.g. mesa this means piglit testcases and review on the
  72. mailing list. This is again to ensure that the new interface actually gets the
  73. job done. The userspace-side reviewer should also provide an Acked-by on the
  74. kernel uAPI patch indicating that they believe the proposed uAPI is sound and
  75. sufficiently documented and validated for userspace's consumption.
  76. - The userspace patches must be against the canonical upstream, not some vendor
  77. fork. This is to make sure that no one cheats on the review and testing
  78. requirements by doing a quick fork.
  79. - The kernel patch can only be merged after all the above requirements are met,
  80. but it **must** be merged to either drm-next or drm-misc-next **before** the
  81. userspace patches land. uAPI always flows from the kernel, doing things the
  82. other way round risks divergence of the uAPI definitions and header files.
  83. These are fairly steep requirements, but have grown out from years of shared
  84. pain and experience with uAPI added hastily, and almost always regretted about
  85. just as fast. GFX devices change really fast, requiring a paradigm shift and
  86. entire new set of uAPI interfaces every few years at least. Together with the
  87. Linux kernel's guarantee to keep existing userspace running for 10+ years this
  88. is already rather painful for the DRM subsystem, with multiple different uAPIs
  89. for the same thing co-existing. If we add a few more complete mistakes into the
  90. mix every year it would be entirely unmanageable.
  91. .. _drm_render_node:
  92. Render nodes
  93. ============
  94. DRM core provides multiple character-devices for user-space to use.
  95. Depending on which device is opened, user-space can perform a different
  96. set of operations (mainly ioctls). The primary node is always created
  97. and called card<num>. Additionally, a currently unused control node,
  98. called controlD<num> is also created. The primary node provides all
  99. legacy operations and historically was the only interface used by
  100. userspace. With KMS, the control node was introduced. However, the
  101. planned KMS control interface has never been written and so the control
  102. node stays unused to date.
  103. With the increased use of offscreen renderers and GPGPU applications,
  104. clients no longer require running compositors or graphics servers to
  105. make use of a GPU. But the DRM API required unprivileged clients to
  106. authenticate to a DRM-Master prior to getting GPU access. To avoid this
  107. step and to grant clients GPU access without authenticating, render
  108. nodes were introduced. Render nodes solely serve render clients, that
  109. is, no modesetting or privileged ioctls can be issued on render nodes.
  110. Only non-global rendering commands are allowed. If a driver supports
  111. render nodes, it must advertise it via the DRIVER_RENDER DRM driver
  112. capability. If not supported, the primary node must be used for render
  113. clients together with the legacy drmAuth authentication procedure.
  114. If a driver advertises render node support, DRM core will create a
  115. separate render node called renderD<num>. There will be one render node
  116. per device. No ioctls except PRIME-related ioctls will be allowed on
  117. this node. Especially GEM_OPEN will be explicitly prohibited. For a
  118. complete list of driver-independent ioctls that can be used on render
  119. nodes, see the ioctls marked DRM_RENDER_ALLOW in drm_ioctl.c Render
  120. nodes are designed to avoid the buffer-leaks, which occur if clients
  121. guess the flink names or mmap offsets on the legacy interface.
  122. Additionally to this basic interface, drivers must mark their
  123. driver-dependent render-only ioctls as DRM_RENDER_ALLOW so render
  124. clients can use them. Driver authors must be careful not to allow any
  125. privileged ioctls on render nodes.
  126. With render nodes, user-space can now control access to the render node
  127. via basic file-system access-modes. A running graphics server which
  128. authenticates clients on the privileged primary/legacy node is no longer
  129. required. Instead, a client can open the render node and is immediately
  130. granted GPU access. Communication between clients (or servers) is done
  131. via PRIME. FLINK from render node to legacy node is not supported. New
  132. clients must not use the insecure FLINK interface.
  133. Besides dropping all modeset/global ioctls, render nodes also drop the
  134. DRM-Master concept. There is no reason to associate render clients with
  135. a DRM-Master as they are independent of any graphics server. Besides,
  136. they must work without any running master, anyway. Drivers must be able
  137. to run without a master object if they support render nodes. If, on the
  138. other hand, a driver requires shared state between clients which is
  139. visible to user-space and accessible beyond open-file boundaries, they
  140. cannot support render nodes.
  141. Device Hot-Unplug
  142. =================
  143. .. note::
  144. The following is the plan. Implementation is not there yet
  145. (2020 May).
  146. Graphics devices (display and/or render) may be connected via USB (e.g.
  147. display adapters or docking stations) or Thunderbolt (e.g. eGPU). An end
  148. user is able to hot-unplug this kind of devices while they are being
  149. used, and expects that the very least the machine does not crash. Any
  150. damage from hot-unplugging a DRM device needs to be limited as much as
  151. possible and userspace must be given the chance to handle it if it wants
  152. to. Ideally, unplugging a DRM device still lets a desktop continue to
  153. run, but that is going to need explicit support throughout the whole
  154. graphics stack: from kernel and userspace drivers, through display
  155. servers, via window system protocols, and in applications and libraries.
  156. Other scenarios that should lead to the same are: unrecoverable GPU
  157. crash, PCI device disappearing off the bus, or forced unbind of a driver
  158. from the physical device.
  159. In other words, from userspace perspective everything needs to keep on
  160. working more or less, until userspace stops using the disappeared DRM
  161. device and closes it completely. Userspace will learn of the device
  162. disappearance from the device removed uevent, ioctls returning ENODEV
  163. (or driver-specific ioctls returning driver-specific things), or open()
  164. returning ENXIO.
  165. Only after userspace has closed all relevant DRM device and dmabuf file
  166. descriptors and removed all mmaps, the DRM driver can tear down its
  167. instance for the device that no longer exists. If the same physical
  168. device somehow comes back in the mean time, it shall be a new DRM
  169. device.
  170. Similar to PIDs, chardev minor numbers are not recycled immediately. A
  171. new DRM device always picks the next free minor number compared to the
  172. previous one allocated, and wraps around when minor numbers are
  173. exhausted.
  174. The goal raises at least the following requirements for the kernel and
  175. drivers.
  176. Requirements for KMS UAPI
  177. -------------------------
  178. - KMS connectors must change their status to disconnected.
  179. - Legacy modesets and pageflips, and atomic commits, both real and
  180. TEST_ONLY, and any other ioctls either fail with ENODEV or fake
  181. success.
  182. - Pending non-blocking KMS operations deliver the DRM events userspace
  183. is expecting. This applies also to ioctls that faked success.
  184. - open() on a device node whose underlying device has disappeared will
  185. fail with ENXIO.
  186. - Attempting to create a DRM lease on a disappeared DRM device will
  187. fail with ENODEV. Existing DRM leases remain and work as listed
  188. above.
  189. Requirements for Render and Cross-Device UAPI
  190. ---------------------------------------------
  191. - All GPU jobs that can no longer run must have their fences
  192. force-signalled to avoid inflicting hangs on userspace.
  193. The associated error code is ENODEV.
  194. - Some userspace APIs already define what should happen when the device
  195. disappears (OpenGL, GL ES: `GL_KHR_robustness`_; `Vulkan`_:
  196. VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST; etc.). DRM drivers are free to implement this
  197. behaviour the way they see best, e.g. returning failures in
  198. driver-specific ioctls and handling those in userspace drivers, or
  199. rely on uevents, and so on.
  200. - dmabuf which point to memory that has disappeared will either fail to
  201. import with ENODEV or continue to be successfully imported if it would
  202. have succeeded before the disappearance. See also about memory maps
  203. below for already imported dmabufs.
  204. - Attempting to import a dmabuf to a disappeared device will either fail
  205. with ENODEV or succeed if it would have succeeded without the
  206. disappearance.
  207. - open() on a device node whose underlying device has disappeared will
  208. fail with ENXIO.
  209. .. _GL_KHR_robustness: https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenGL/extensions/KHR/KHR_robustness.txt
  210. .. _Vulkan: https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/
  211. Requirements for Memory Maps
  212. ----------------------------
  213. Memory maps have further requirements that apply to both existing maps
  214. and maps created after the device has disappeared. If the underlying
  215. memory disappears, the map is created or modified such that reads and
  216. writes will still complete successfully but the result is undefined.
  217. This applies to both userspace mmap()'d memory and memory pointed to by
  218. dmabuf which might be mapped to other devices (cross-device dmabuf
  219. imports).
  220. Raising SIGBUS is not an option, because userspace cannot realistically
  221. handle it. Signal handlers are global, which makes them extremely
  222. difficult to use correctly from libraries like those that Mesa produces.
  223. Signal handlers are not composable, you can't have different handlers
  224. for GPU1 and GPU2 from different vendors, and a third handler for
  225. mmapped regular files. Threads cause additional pain with signal
  226. handling as well.
  227. .. _drm_driver_ioctl:
  228. IOCTL Support on Device Nodes
  229. =============================
  230. .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_ioctl.c
  231. :doc: driver specific ioctls
  232. Recommended IOCTL Return Values
  233. -------------------------------
  234. In theory a driver's IOCTL callback is only allowed to return very few error
  235. codes. In practice it's good to abuse a few more. This section documents common
  236. practice within the DRM subsystem:
  237. ENOENT:
  238. Strictly this should only be used when a file doesn't exist e.g. when
  239. calling the open() syscall. We reuse that to signal any kind of object
  240. lookup failure, e.g. for unknown GEM buffer object handles, unknown KMS
  241. object handles and similar cases.
  242. ENOSPC:
  243. Some drivers use this to differentiate "out of kernel memory" from "out
  244. of VRAM". Sometimes also applies to other limited gpu resources used for
  245. rendering (e.g. when you have a special limited compression buffer).
  246. Sometimes resource allocation/reservation issues in command submission
  247. IOCTLs are also signalled through EDEADLK.
  248. Simply running out of kernel/system memory is signalled through ENOMEM.
  249. EPERM/EACCES:
  250. Returned for an operation that is valid, but needs more privileges.
  251. E.g. root-only or much more common, DRM master-only operations return
  252. this when called by unpriviledged clients. There's no clear
  253. difference between EACCES and EPERM.
  254. ENODEV:
  255. The device is not present anymore or is not yet fully initialized.
  256. EOPNOTSUPP:
  257. Feature (like PRIME, modesetting, GEM) is not supported by the driver.
  258. ENXIO:
  259. Remote failure, either a hardware transaction (like i2c), but also used
  260. when the exporting driver of a shared dma-buf or fence doesn't support a
  261. feature needed.
  262. EINTR:
  263. DRM drivers assume that userspace restarts all IOCTLs. Any DRM IOCTL can
  264. return EINTR and in such a case should be restarted with the IOCTL
  265. parameters left unchanged.
  266. EIO:
  267. The GPU died and couldn't be resurrected through a reset. Modesetting
  268. hardware failures are signalled through the "link status" connector
  269. property.
  270. EINVAL:
  271. Catch-all for anything that is an invalid argument combination which
  272. cannot work.
  273. IOCTL also use other error codes like ETIME, EFAULT, EBUSY, ENOTTY but their
  274. usage is in line with the common meanings. The above list tries to just document
  275. DRM specific patterns. Note that ENOTTY has the slightly unintuitive meaning of
  276. "this IOCTL does not exist", and is used exactly as such in DRM.
  277. .. kernel-doc:: include/drm/drm_ioctl.h
  278. :internal:
  279. .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_ioctl.c
  280. :export:
  281. .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_ioc32.c
  282. :export:
  283. Testing and validation
  284. ======================
  285. Testing Requirements for userspace API
  286. --------------------------------------
  287. New cross-driver userspace interface extensions, like new IOCTL, new KMS
  288. properties, new files in sysfs or anything else that constitutes an API change
  289. should have driver-agnostic testcases in IGT for that feature, if such a test
  290. can be reasonably made using IGT for the target hardware.
  291. Validating changes with IGT
  292. ---------------------------
  293. There's a collection of tests that aims to cover the whole functionality of
  294. DRM drivers and that can be used to check that changes to DRM drivers or the
  295. core don't regress existing functionality. This test suite is called IGT and
  296. its code and instructions to build and run can be found in
  297. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/igt-gpu-tools/.
  298. Using VKMS to test DRM API
  299. --------------------------
  300. VKMS is a software-only model of a KMS driver that is useful for testing
  301. and for running compositors. VKMS aims to enable a virtual display without
  302. the need for a hardware display capability. These characteristics made VKMS
  303. a perfect tool for validating the DRM core behavior and also support the
  304. compositor developer. VKMS makes it possible to test DRM functions in a
  305. virtual machine without display, simplifying the validation of some of the
  306. core changes.
  307. To Validate changes in DRM API with VKMS, start setting the kernel: make
  308. sure to enable VKMS module; compile the kernel with the VKMS enabled and
  309. install it in the target machine. VKMS can be run in a Virtual Machine
  310. (QEMU, virtme or similar). It's recommended the use of KVM with the minimum
  311. of 1GB of RAM and four cores.
  312. It's possible to run the IGT-tests in a VM in two ways:
  313. 1. Use IGT inside a VM
  314. 2. Use IGT from the host machine and write the results in a shared directory.
  315. As follow, there is an example of using a VM with a shared directory with
  316. the host machine to run igt-tests. As an example it's used virtme::
  317. $ virtme-run --rwdir /path/for/shared_dir --kdir=path/for/kernel/directory --mods=auto
  318. Run the igt-tests in the guest machine, as example it's ran the 'kms_flip'
  319. tests::
  320. $ /path/for/igt-gpu-tools/scripts/run-tests.sh -p -s -t "kms_flip.*" -v
  321. In this example, instead of build the igt_runner, Piglit is used
  322. (-p option); it's created html summary of the tests results and it's saved
  323. in the folder "igt-gpu-tools/results"; it's executed only the igt-tests
  324. matching the -t option.
  325. Display CRC Support
  326. -------------------
  327. .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_debugfs_crc.c
  328. :doc: CRC ABI
  329. .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_debugfs_crc.c
  330. :export:
  331. Debugfs Support
  332. ---------------
  333. .. kernel-doc:: include/drm/drm_debugfs.h
  334. :internal:
  335. .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_debugfs.c
  336. :export:
  337. Sysfs Support
  338. =============
  339. .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_sysfs.c
  340. :doc: overview
  341. .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_sysfs.c
  342. :export:
  343. VBlank event handling
  344. =====================
  345. The DRM core exposes two vertical blank related ioctls:
  346. DRM_IOCTL_WAIT_VBLANK
  347. This takes a struct drm_wait_vblank structure as its argument, and
  348. it is used to block or request a signal when a specified vblank
  349. event occurs.
  350. DRM_IOCTL_MODESET_CTL
  351. This was only used for user-mode-settind drivers around modesetting
  352. changes to allow the kernel to update the vblank interrupt after
  353. mode setting, since on many devices the vertical blank counter is
  354. reset to 0 at some point during modeset. Modern drivers should not
  355. call this any more since with kernel mode setting it is a no-op.
  356. Userspace API Structures
  357. ========================
  358. .. kernel-doc:: include/uapi/drm/drm_mode.h
  359. :doc: overview
  360. .. _crtc_index:
  361. CRTC index
  362. ----------
  363. CRTC's have both an object ID and an index, and they are not the same thing.
  364. The index is used in cases where a densely packed identifier for a CRTC is
  365. needed, for instance a bitmask of CRTC's. The member possible_crtcs of struct
  366. drm_mode_get_plane is an example.
  367. DRM_IOCTL_MODE_GETRESOURCES populates a structure with an array of CRTC ID's,
  368. and the CRTC index is its position in this array.
  369. .. kernel-doc:: include/uapi/drm/drm.h
  370. :internal:
  371. .. kernel-doc:: include/uapi/drm/drm_mode.h
  372. :internal: