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authorDaniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>2024-04-07 18:49:45 +0000
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Signed-off-by: Daniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>
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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: