On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 2:18 PM, Lucas Stach l.stach@pengutronix.de wrote:
I strongly disagree with exposing low-level hardware details like tiling to userspace. If we have to do the negotiation of those things in userspace we will end up with having to pipe those information through things like the wayland protocol. I don't see how this could ever be considered a good idea.
I would rather see kernel drivers negotiating those things at dmabuf attach time in way invisible to userspace. I agree that this negotiation thing isn't easy to get right for the plethora of different hardware constraints we see today, but I would rather see this in-kernel, where we have the chance to fix things up if needed, than in a fixed userspace interface.
The problem with negotiating tiling in the kernel for at least drm/i915 is that userspace needs to know the tiling and for allocating actually be in charge of it. The approach used by prime thus far is to simply use linear buffers between different gpus. If you want something better I guess you need to have a fairly tightly integrate userspace driver, so I don't see how passing around the tiling information should be an issue for those cases. -Daniel