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- .. Copyright 2020 DisplayLink (UK) Ltd.
- ===================
- Userland interfaces
- ===================
- The DRM core exports several interfaces to applications, generally
- intended to be used through corresponding libdrm wrapper functions. In
- addition, drivers export device-specific interfaces for use by userspace
- drivers & device-aware applications through ioctls and sysfs files.
- External interfaces include: memory mapping, context management, DMA
- operations, AGP management, vblank control, fence management, memory
- management, and output management.
- Cover generic ioctls and sysfs layout here. We only need high-level
- info, since man pages should cover the rest.
- libdrm Device Lookup
- ====================
- .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_ioctl.c
- :doc: getunique and setversion story
- .. _drm_primary_node:
- Primary Nodes, DRM Master and Authentication
- ============================================
- .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_auth.c
- :doc: master and authentication
- .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_auth.c
- :export:
- .. kernel-doc:: include/drm/drm_auth.h
- :internal:
- .. _drm_leasing:
- DRM Display Resource Leasing
- ============================
- .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_lease.c
- :doc: drm leasing
- Open-Source Userspace Requirements
- ==================================
- The DRM subsystem has stricter requirements than most other kernel subsystems on
- what the userspace side for new uAPI needs to look like. This section here
- explains what exactly those requirements are, and why they exist.
- The short summary is that any addition of DRM uAPI requires corresponding
- open-sourced userspace patches, and those patches must be reviewed and ready for
- merging into a suitable and canonical upstream project.
- GFX devices (both display and render/GPU side) are really complex bits of
- hardware, with userspace and kernel by necessity having to work together really
- closely. The interfaces, for rendering and modesetting, must be extremely wide
- and flexible, and therefore it is almost always impossible to precisely define
- them for every possible corner case. This in turn makes it really practically
- infeasible to differentiate between behaviour that's required by userspace, and
- which must not be changed to avoid regressions, and behaviour which is only an
- accidental artifact of the current implementation.
- Without access to the full source code of all userspace users that means it
- becomes impossible to change the implementation details, since userspace could
- depend upon the accidental behaviour of the current implementation in minute
- details. And debugging such regressions without access to source code is pretty
- much impossible. As a consequence this means:
- - The Linux kernel's "no regression" policy holds in practice only for
- open-source userspace of the DRM subsystem. DRM developers are perfectly fine
- if closed-source blob drivers in userspace use the same uAPI as the open
- drivers, but they must do so in the exact same way as the open drivers.
- Creative (ab)use of the interfaces will, and in the past routinely has, lead
- to breakage.
- - Any new userspace interface must have an open-source implementation as
- demonstration vehicle.
- The other reason for requiring open-source userspace is uAPI review. Since the
- kernel and userspace parts of a GFX stack must work together so closely, code
- review can only assess whether a new interface achieves its goals by looking at
- both sides. Making sure that the interface indeed covers the use-case fully
- leads to a few additional requirements:
- - The open-source userspace must not be a toy/test application, but the real
- thing. Specifically it needs to handle all the usual error and corner cases.
- These are often the places where new uAPI falls apart and hence essential to
- assess the fitness of a proposed interface.
- - The userspace side must be fully reviewed and tested to the standards of that
- userspace project. For e.g. mesa this means piglit testcases and review on the
- mailing list. This is again to ensure that the new interface actually gets the
- job done. The userspace-side reviewer should also provide an Acked-by on the
- kernel uAPI patch indicating that they believe the proposed uAPI is sound and
- sufficiently documented and validated for userspace's consumption.
- - The userspace patches must be against the canonical upstream, not some vendor
- fork. This is to make sure that no one cheats on the review and testing
- requirements by doing a quick fork.
- - The kernel patch can only be merged after all the above requirements are met,
- but it **must** be merged to either drm-next or drm-misc-next **before** the
- userspace patches land. uAPI always flows from the kernel, doing things the
- other way round risks divergence of the uAPI definitions and header files.
- These are fairly steep requirements, but have grown out from years of shared
- pain and experience with uAPI added hastily, and almost always regretted about
- just as fast. GFX devices change really fast, requiring a paradigm shift and
- entire new set of uAPI interfaces every few years at least. Together with the
- Linux kernel's guarantee to keep existing userspace running for 10+ years this
- is already rather painful for the DRM subsystem, with multiple different uAPIs
- for the same thing co-existing. If we add a few more complete mistakes into the
- mix every year it would be entirely unmanageable.
- .. _drm_render_node:
- Render nodes
- ============
- DRM core provides multiple character-devices for user-space to use.
- Depending on which device is opened, user-space can perform a different
- set of operations (mainly ioctls). The primary node is always created
- and called card<num>. Additionally, a currently unused control node,
- called controlD<num> is also created. The primary node provides all
- legacy operations and historically was the only interface used by
- userspace. With KMS, the control node was introduced. However, the
- planned KMS control interface has never been written and so the control
- node stays unused to date.
- With the increased use of offscreen renderers and GPGPU applications,
- clients no longer require running compositors or graphics servers to
- make use of a GPU. But the DRM API required unprivileged clients to
- authenticate to a DRM-Master prior to getting GPU access. To avoid this
- step and to grant clients GPU access without authenticating, render
- nodes were introduced. Render nodes solely serve render clients, that
- is, no modesetting or privileged ioctls can be issued on render nodes.
- Only non-global rendering commands are allowed. If a driver supports
- render nodes, it must advertise it via the DRIVER_RENDER DRM driver
- capability. If not supported, the primary node must be used for render
- clients together with the legacy drmAuth authentication procedure.
- If a driver advertises render node support, DRM core will create a
- separate render node called renderD<num>. There will be one render node
- per device. No ioctls except PRIME-related ioctls will be allowed on
- this node. Especially GEM_OPEN will be explicitly prohibited. For a
- complete list of driver-independent ioctls that can be used on render
- nodes, see the ioctls marked DRM_RENDER_ALLOW in drm_ioctl.c Render
- nodes are designed to avoid the buffer-leaks, which occur if clients
- guess the flink names or mmap offsets on the legacy interface.
- Additionally to this basic interface, drivers must mark their
- driver-dependent render-only ioctls as DRM_RENDER_ALLOW so render
- clients can use them. Driver authors must be careful not to allow any
- privileged ioctls on render nodes.
- With render nodes, user-space can now control access to the render node
- via basic file-system access-modes. A running graphics server which
- authenticates clients on the privileged primary/legacy node is no longer
- required. Instead, a client can open the render node and is immediately
- granted GPU access. Communication between clients (or servers) is done
- via PRIME. FLINK from render node to legacy node is not supported. New
- clients must not use the insecure FLINK interface.
- Besides dropping all modeset/global ioctls, render nodes also drop the
- DRM-Master concept. There is no reason to associate render clients with
- a DRM-Master as they are independent of any graphics server. Besides,
- they must work without any running master, anyway. Drivers must be able
- to run without a master object if they support render nodes. If, on the
- other hand, a driver requires shared state between clients which is
- visible to user-space and accessible beyond open-file boundaries, they
- cannot support render nodes.
- Device Hot-Unplug
- =================
- .. note::
- The following is the plan. Implementation is not there yet
- (2020 May).
- Graphics devices (display and/or render) may be connected via USB (e.g.
- display adapters or docking stations) or Thunderbolt (e.g. eGPU). An end
- user is able to hot-unplug this kind of devices while they are being
- used, and expects that the very least the machine does not crash. Any
- damage from hot-unplugging a DRM device needs to be limited as much as
- possible and userspace must be given the chance to handle it if it wants
- to. Ideally, unplugging a DRM device still lets a desktop continue to
- run, but that is going to need explicit support throughout the whole
- graphics stack: from kernel and userspace drivers, through display
- servers, via window system protocols, and in applications and libraries.
- Other scenarios that should lead to the same are: unrecoverable GPU
- crash, PCI device disappearing off the bus, or forced unbind of a driver
- from the physical device.
- In other words, from userspace perspective everything needs to keep on
- working more or less, until userspace stops using the disappeared DRM
- device and closes it completely. Userspace will learn of the device
- disappearance from the device removed uevent, ioctls returning ENODEV
- (or driver-specific ioctls returning driver-specific things), or open()
- returning ENXIO.
- Only after userspace has closed all relevant DRM device and dmabuf file
- descriptors and removed all mmaps, the DRM driver can tear down its
- instance for the device that no longer exists. If the same physical
- device somehow comes back in the mean time, it shall be a new DRM
- device.
- Similar to PIDs, chardev minor numbers are not recycled immediately. A
- new DRM device always picks the next free minor number compared to the
- previous one allocated, and wraps around when minor numbers are
- exhausted.
- The goal raises at least the following requirements for the kernel and
- drivers.
- Requirements for KMS UAPI
- -------------------------
- - KMS connectors must change their status to disconnected.
- - Legacy modesets and pageflips, and atomic commits, both real and
- TEST_ONLY, and any other ioctls either fail with ENODEV or fake
- success.
- - Pending non-blocking KMS operations deliver the DRM events userspace
- is expecting. This applies also to ioctls that faked success.
- - open() on a device node whose underlying device has disappeared will
- fail with ENXIO.
- - Attempting to create a DRM lease on a disappeared DRM device will
- fail with ENODEV. Existing DRM leases remain and work as listed
- above.
- Requirements for Render and Cross-Device UAPI
- ---------------------------------------------
- - All GPU jobs that can no longer run must have their fences
- force-signalled to avoid inflicting hangs on userspace.
- The associated error code is ENODEV.
- - Some userspace APIs already define what should happen when the device
- disappears (OpenGL, GL ES: `GL_KHR_robustness`_; `Vulkan`_:
- VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST; etc.). DRM drivers are free to implement this
- behaviour the way they see best, e.g. returning failures in
- driver-specific ioctls and handling those in userspace drivers, or
- rely on uevents, and so on.
- - dmabuf which point to memory that has disappeared will either fail to
- import with ENODEV or continue to be successfully imported if it would
- have succeeded before the disappearance. See also about memory maps
- below for already imported dmabufs.
- - Attempting to import a dmabuf to a disappeared device will either fail
- with ENODEV or succeed if it would have succeeded without the
- disappearance.
- - open() on a device node whose underlying device has disappeared will
- fail with ENXIO.
- .. _GL_KHR_robustness: https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenGL/extensions/KHR/KHR_robustness.txt
- .. _Vulkan: https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/
- Requirements for Memory Maps
- ----------------------------
- Memory maps have further requirements that apply to both existing maps
- and maps created after the device has disappeared. If the underlying
- memory disappears, the map is created or modified such that reads and
- writes will still complete successfully but the result is undefined.
- This applies to both userspace mmap()'d memory and memory pointed to by
- dmabuf which might be mapped to other devices (cross-device dmabuf
- imports).
- Raising SIGBUS is not an option, because userspace cannot realistically
- handle it. Signal handlers are global, which makes them extremely
- difficult to use correctly from libraries like those that Mesa produces.
- Signal handlers are not composable, you can't have different handlers
- for GPU1 and GPU2 from different vendors, and a third handler for
- mmapped regular files. Threads cause additional pain with signal
- handling as well.
- .. _drm_driver_ioctl:
- IOCTL Support on Device Nodes
- =============================
- .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_ioctl.c
- :doc: driver specific ioctls
- Recommended IOCTL Return Values
- -------------------------------
- In theory a driver's IOCTL callback is only allowed to return very few error
- codes. In practice it's good to abuse a few more. This section documents common
- practice within the DRM subsystem:
- ENOENT:
- Strictly this should only be used when a file doesn't exist e.g. when
- calling the open() syscall. We reuse that to signal any kind of object
- lookup failure, e.g. for unknown GEM buffer object handles, unknown KMS
- object handles and similar cases.
- ENOSPC:
- Some drivers use this to differentiate "out of kernel memory" from "out
- of VRAM". Sometimes also applies to other limited gpu resources used for
- rendering (e.g. when you have a special limited compression buffer).
- Sometimes resource allocation/reservation issues in command submission
- IOCTLs are also signalled through EDEADLK.
- Simply running out of kernel/system memory is signalled through ENOMEM.
- EPERM/EACCES:
- Returned for an operation that is valid, but needs more privileges.
- E.g. root-only or much more common, DRM master-only operations return
- this when called by unpriviledged clients. There's no clear
- difference between EACCES and EPERM.
- ENODEV:
- The device is not present anymore or is not yet fully initialized.
- EOPNOTSUPP:
- Feature (like PRIME, modesetting, GEM) is not supported by the driver.
- ENXIO:
- Remote failure, either a hardware transaction (like i2c), but also used
- when the exporting driver of a shared dma-buf or fence doesn't support a
- feature needed.
- EINTR:
- DRM drivers assume that userspace restarts all IOCTLs. Any DRM IOCTL can
- return EINTR and in such a case should be restarted with the IOCTL
- parameters left unchanged.
- EIO:
- The GPU died and couldn't be resurrected through a reset. Modesetting
- hardware failures are signalled through the "link status" connector
- property.
- EINVAL:
- Catch-all for anything that is an invalid argument combination which
- cannot work.
- IOCTL also use other error codes like ETIME, EFAULT, EBUSY, ENOTTY but their
- usage is in line with the common meanings. The above list tries to just document
- DRM specific patterns. Note that ENOTTY has the slightly unintuitive meaning of
- "this IOCTL does not exist", and is used exactly as such in DRM.
- .. kernel-doc:: include/drm/drm_ioctl.h
- :internal:
- .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_ioctl.c
- :export:
- .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_ioc32.c
- :export:
- Testing and validation
- ======================
- Testing Requirements for userspace API
- --------------------------------------
- New cross-driver userspace interface extensions, like new IOCTL, new KMS
- properties, new files in sysfs or anything else that constitutes an API change
- should have driver-agnostic testcases in IGT for that feature, if such a test
- can be reasonably made using IGT for the target hardware.
- Validating changes with IGT
- ---------------------------
- There's a collection of tests that aims to cover the whole functionality of
- DRM drivers and that can be used to check that changes to DRM drivers or the
- core don't regress existing functionality. This test suite is called IGT and
- its code and instructions to build and run can be found in
- https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/igt-gpu-tools/.
- Using VKMS to test DRM API
- --------------------------
- VKMS is a software-only model of a KMS driver that is useful for testing
- and for running compositors. VKMS aims to enable a virtual display without
- the need for a hardware display capability. These characteristics made VKMS
- a perfect tool for validating the DRM core behavior and also support the
- compositor developer. VKMS makes it possible to test DRM functions in a
- virtual machine without display, simplifying the validation of some of the
- core changes.
- To Validate changes in DRM API with VKMS, start setting the kernel: make
- sure to enable VKMS module; compile the kernel with the VKMS enabled and
- install it in the target machine. VKMS can be run in a Virtual Machine
- (QEMU, virtme or similar). It's recommended the use of KVM with the minimum
- of 1GB of RAM and four cores.
- It's possible to run the IGT-tests in a VM in two ways:
- 1. Use IGT inside a VM
- 2. Use IGT from the host machine and write the results in a shared directory.
- As follow, there is an example of using a VM with a shared directory with
- the host machine to run igt-tests. As an example it's used virtme::
- $ virtme-run --rwdir /path/for/shared_dir --kdir=path/for/kernel/directory --mods=auto
- Run the igt-tests in the guest machine, as example it's ran the 'kms_flip'
- tests::
- $ /path/for/igt-gpu-tools/scripts/run-tests.sh -p -s -t "kms_flip.*" -v
- In this example, instead of build the igt_runner, Piglit is used
- (-p option); it's created html summary of the tests results and it's saved
- in the folder "igt-gpu-tools/results"; it's executed only the igt-tests
- matching the -t option.
- Display CRC Support
- -------------------
- .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_debugfs_crc.c
- :doc: CRC ABI
- .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_debugfs_crc.c
- :export:
- Debugfs Support
- ---------------
- .. kernel-doc:: include/drm/drm_debugfs.h
- :internal:
- .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_debugfs.c
- :export:
- Sysfs Support
- =============
- .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_sysfs.c
- :doc: overview
- .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_sysfs.c
- :export:
- VBlank event handling
- =====================
- The DRM core exposes two vertical blank related ioctls:
- DRM_IOCTL_WAIT_VBLANK
- This takes a struct drm_wait_vblank structure as its argument, and
- it is used to block or request a signal when a specified vblank
- event occurs.
- DRM_IOCTL_MODESET_CTL
- This was only used for user-mode-settind drivers around modesetting
- changes to allow the kernel to update the vblank interrupt after
- mode setting, since on many devices the vertical blank counter is
- reset to 0 at some point during modeset. Modern drivers should not
- call this any more since with kernel mode setting it is a no-op.
- Userspace API Structures
- ========================
- .. kernel-doc:: include/uapi/drm/drm_mode.h
- :doc: overview
- .. _crtc_index:
- CRTC index
- ----------
- CRTC's have both an object ID and an index, and they are not the same thing.
- The index is used in cases where a densely packed identifier for a CRTC is
- needed, for instance a bitmask of CRTC's. The member possible_crtcs of struct
- drm_mode_get_plane is an example.
- DRM_IOCTL_MODE_GETRESOURCES populates a structure with an array of CRTC ID's,
- and the CRTC index is its position in this array.
- .. kernel-doc:: include/uapi/drm/drm.h
- :internal:
- .. kernel-doc:: include/uapi/drm/drm_mode.h
- :internal:
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