| .. _todo: |
| |
| ========= |
| TODO list |
| ========= |
| |
| This section contains a list of smaller janitorial tasks in the kernel DRM |
| graphics subsystem useful as newbie projects. Or for slow rainy days. |
| |
| Difficulty |
| ---------- |
| |
| To make it easier task are categorized into different levels: |
| |
| Starter: Good tasks to get started with the DRM subsystem. |
| |
| Intermediate: Tasks which need some experience with working in the DRM |
| subsystem, or some specific GPU/display graphics knowledge. For debugging issue |
| it's good to have the relevant hardware (or a virtual driver set up) available |
| for testing. |
| |
| Advanced: Tricky tasks that need fairly good understanding of the DRM subsystem |
| and graphics topics. Generally need the relevant hardware for development and |
| testing. |
| |
| Subsystem-wide refactorings |
| =========================== |
| |
| Remove custom dumb_map_offset implementations |
| --------------------------------------------- |
| |
| All GEM based drivers should be using drm_gem_create_mmap_offset() instead. |
| Audit each individual driver, make sure it'll work with the generic |
| implementation (there's lots of outdated locking leftovers in various |
| implementations), and then remove it. |
| |
| Contact: Daniel Vetter, respective driver maintainers |
| |
| Level: Intermediate |
| |
| Convert existing KMS drivers to atomic modesetting |
| -------------------------------------------------- |
| |
| 3.19 has the atomic modeset interfaces and helpers, so drivers can now be |
| converted over. Modern compositors like Wayland or Surfaceflinger on Android |
| really want an atomic modeset interface, so this is all about the bright |
| future. |
| |
| There is a conversion guide for atomic and all you need is a GPU for a |
| non-converted driver (again virtual HW drivers for KVM are still all |
| suitable). |
| |
| As part of this drivers also need to convert to universal plane (which means |
| exposing primary & cursor as proper plane objects). But that's much easier to |
| do by directly using the new atomic helper driver callbacks. |
| |
| Contact: Daniel Vetter, respective driver maintainers |
| |
| Level: Advanced |
| |
| Clean up the clipped coordination confusion around planes |
| --------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
| We have a helper to get this right with drm_plane_helper_check_update(), but |
| it's not consistently used. This should be fixed, preferrably in the atomic |
| helpers (and drivers then moved over to clipped coordinates). Probably the |
| helper should also be moved from drm_plane_helper.c to the atomic helpers, to |
| avoid confusion - the other helpers in that file are all deprecated legacy |
| helpers. |
| |
| Contact: Ville Syrjälä, Daniel Vetter, driver maintainers |
| |
| Level: Advanced |
| |
| Improve plane atomic_check helpers |
| ---------------------------------- |
| |
| Aside from the clipped coordinates right above there's a few suboptimal things |
| with the current helpers: |
| |
| - drm_plane_helper_funcs->atomic_check gets called for enabled or disabled |
| planes. At best this seems to confuse drivers, worst it means they blow up |
| when the plane is disabled without the CRTC. The only special handling is |
| resetting values in the plane state structures, which instead should be moved |
| into the drm_plane_funcs->atomic_duplicate_state functions. |
| |
| - Once that's done, helpers could stop calling ->atomic_check for disabled |
| planes. |
| |
| - Then we could go through all the drivers and remove the more-or-less confused |
| checks for plane_state->fb and plane_state->crtc. |
| |
| Contact: Daniel Vetter |
| |
| Level: Advanced |
| |
| Convert early atomic drivers to async commit helpers |
| ---------------------------------------------------- |
| |
| For the first year the atomic modeset helpers didn't support asynchronous / |
| nonblocking commits, and every driver had to hand-roll them. This is fixed |
| now, but there's still a pile of existing drivers that easily could be |
| converted over to the new infrastructure. |
| |
| One issue with the helpers is that they require that drivers handle completion |
| events for atomic commits correctly. But fixing these bugs is good anyway. |
| |
| Contact: Daniel Vetter, respective driver maintainers |
| |
| Level: Advanced |
| |
| Fallout from atomic KMS |
| ----------------------- |
| |
| ``drm_atomic_helper.c`` provides a batch of functions which implement legacy |
| IOCTLs on top of the new atomic driver interface. Which is really nice for |
| gradual conversion of drivers, but unfortunately the semantic mismatches are |
| a bit too severe. So there's some follow-up work to adjust the function |
| interfaces to fix these issues: |
| |
| * atomic needs the lock acquire context. At the moment that's passed around |
| implicitly with some horrible hacks, and it's also allocate with |
| ``GFP_NOFAIL`` behind the scenes. All legacy paths need to start allocating |
| the acquire context explicitly on stack and then also pass it down into |
| drivers explicitly so that the legacy-on-atomic functions can use them. |
| |
| Except for some driver code this is done. This task should be finished by |
| adding WARN_ON(!drm_drv_uses_atomic_modeset) in drm_modeset_lock_all(). |
| |
| * A bunch of the vtable hooks are now in the wrong place: DRM has a split |
| between core vfunc tables (named ``drm_foo_funcs``), which are used to |
| implement the userspace ABI. And then there's the optional hooks for the |
| helper libraries (name ``drm_foo_helper_funcs``), which are purely for |
| internal use. Some of these hooks should be move from ``_funcs`` to |
| ``_helper_funcs`` since they are not part of the core ABI. There's a |
| ``FIXME`` comment in the kerneldoc for each such case in ``drm_crtc.h``. |
| |
| Contact: Daniel Vetter |
| |
| Level: Intermediate |
| |
| Get rid of dev->struct_mutex from GEM drivers |
| --------------------------------------------- |
| |
| ``dev->struct_mutex`` is the Big DRM Lock from legacy days and infested |
| everything. Nowadays in modern drivers the only bit where it's mandatory is |
| serializing GEM buffer object destruction. Which unfortunately means drivers |
| have to keep track of that lock and either call ``unreference`` or |
| ``unreference_locked`` depending upon context. |
| |
| Core GEM doesn't have a need for ``struct_mutex`` any more since kernel 4.8, |
| and there's a ``gem_free_object_unlocked`` callback for any drivers which are |
| entirely ``struct_mutex`` free. |
| |
| For drivers that need ``struct_mutex`` it should be replaced with a driver- |
| private lock. The tricky part is the BO free functions, since those can't |
| reliably take that lock any more. Instead state needs to be protected with |
| suitable subordinate locks or some cleanup work pushed to a worker thread. For |
| performance-critical drivers it might also be better to go with a more |
| fine-grained per-buffer object and per-context lockings scheme. Currently only the |
| ``msm`` driver still use ``struct_mutex``. |
| |
| Contact: Daniel Vetter, respective driver maintainers |
| |
| Level: Advanced |
| |
| Convert logging to drm_* functions with drm_device paramater |
| ------------------------------------------------------------ |
| |
| For drivers which could have multiple instances, it is necessary to |
| differentiate between which is which in the logs. Since DRM_INFO/WARN/ERROR |
| don't do this, drivers used dev_info/warn/err to make this differentiation. We |
| now have drm_* variants of the drm print functions, so we can start to convert |
| those drivers back to using drm-formatted specific log messages. |
| |
| Before you start this conversion please contact the relevant maintainers to make |
| sure your work will be merged - not everyone agrees that the DRM dmesg macros |
| are better. |
| |
| Contact: Sean Paul, Maintainer of the driver you plan to convert |
| |
| Level: Starter |
| |
| Convert drivers to use simple modeset suspend/resume |
| ---------------------------------------------------- |
| |
| Most drivers (except i915 and nouveau) that use |
| drm_atomic_helper_suspend/resume() can probably be converted to use |
| drm_mode_config_helper_suspend/resume(). Also there's still open-coded version |
| of the atomic suspend/resume code in older atomic modeset drivers. |
| |
| Contact: Maintainer of the driver you plan to convert |
| |
| Level: Intermediate |
| |
| Convert drivers to use drm_fbdev_generic_setup() |
| ------------------------------------------------ |
| |
| Most drivers can use drm_fbdev_generic_setup(). Driver have to implement |
| atomic modesetting and GEM vmap support. Current generic fbdev emulation |
| expects the framebuffer in system memory (or system-like memory). |
| |
| Contact: Maintainer of the driver you plan to convert |
| |
| Level: Intermediate |
| |
| drm_framebuffer_funcs and drm_mode_config_funcs.fb_create cleanup |
| ----------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
| A lot more drivers could be switched over to the drm_gem_framebuffer helpers. |
| Various hold-ups: |
| |
| - Need to switch over to the generic dirty tracking code using |
| drm_atomic_helper_dirtyfb first (e.g. qxl). |
| |
| - Need to switch to drm_fbdev_generic_setup(), otherwise a lot of the custom fb |
| setup code can't be deleted. |
| |
| - Many drivers wrap drm_gem_fb_create() only to check for valid formats. For |
| atomic drivers we could check for valid formats by calling |
| drm_plane_check_pixel_format() against all planes, and pass if any plane |
| supports the format. For non-atomic that's not possible since like the format |
| list for the primary plane is fake and we'd therefor reject valid formats. |
| |
| - Many drivers subclass drm_framebuffer, we'd need a embedding compatible |
| version of the varios drm_gem_fb_create functions. Maybe called |
| drm_gem_fb_create/_with_dirty/_with_funcs as needed. |
| |
| Contact: Daniel Vetter |
| |
| Level: Intermediate |
| |
| Clean up mmap forwarding |
| ------------------------ |
| |
| A lot of drivers forward gem mmap calls to dma-buf mmap for imported buffers. |
| And also a lot of them forward dma-buf mmap to the gem mmap implementations. |
| There's drm_gem_prime_mmap() for this now, but still needs to be rolled out. |
| |
| Contact: Daniel Vetter |
| |
| Level: Intermediate |
| |
| Generic fbdev defio support |
| --------------------------- |
| |
| The defio support code in the fbdev core has some very specific requirements, |
| which means drivers need to have a special framebuffer for fbdev. The main |
| issue is that it uses some fields in struct page itself, which breaks shmem |
| gem objects (and other things). To support defio, affected drivers require |
| the use of a shadow buffer, which may add CPU and memory overhead. |
| |
| Possible solution would be to write our own defio mmap code in the drm fbdev |
| emulation. It would need to fully wrap the existing mmap ops, forwarding |
| everything after it has done the write-protect/mkwrite trickery: |
| |
| - In the drm_fbdev_fb_mmap helper, if we need defio, change the |
| default page prots to write-protected with something like this:: |
| |
| vma->vm_page_prot = pgprot_wrprotect(vma->vm_page_prot); |
| |
| - Set the mkwrite and fsync callbacks with similar implementions to the core |
| fbdev defio stuff. These should all work on plain ptes, they don't actually |
| require a struct page. uff. These should all work on plain ptes, they don't |
| actually require a struct page. |
| |
| - Track the dirty pages in a separate structure (bitfield with one bit per page |
| should work) to avoid clobbering struct page. |
| |
| Might be good to also have some igt testcases for this. |
| |
| Contact: Daniel Vetter, Noralf Tronnes |
| |
| Level: Advanced |
| |
| idr_init_base() |
| --------------- |
| |
| DRM core&drivers uses a lot of idr (integer lookup directories) for mapping |
| userspace IDs to internal objects, and in most places ID=0 means NULL and hence |
| is never used. Switching to idr_init_base() for these would make the idr more |
| efficient. |
| |
| Contact: Daniel Vetter |
| |
| Level: Starter |
| |
| struct drm_gem_object_funcs |
| --------------------------- |
| |
| GEM objects can now have a function table instead of having the callbacks on the |
| DRM driver struct. This is now the preferred way and drivers can be moved over. |
| |
| We also need a 2nd version of the CMA define that doesn't require the |
| vmapping to be present (different hook for prime importing). Plus this needs to |
| be rolled out to all drivers using their own implementations, too. |
| |
| Level: Intermediate |
| |
| Use DRM_MODESET_LOCK_ALL_* helpers instead of boilerplate |
| --------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
| For cases where drivers are attempting to grab the modeset locks with a local |
| acquire context. Replace the boilerplate code surrounding |
| drm_modeset_lock_all_ctx() with DRM_MODESET_LOCK_ALL_BEGIN() and |
| DRM_MODESET_LOCK_ALL_END() instead. |
| |
| This should also be done for all places where drm_modest_lock_all() is still |
| used. |
| |
| As a reference, take a look at the conversions already completed in drm core. |
| |
| Contact: Sean Paul, respective driver maintainers |
| |
| Level: Starter |
| |
| Rename CMA helpers to DMA helpers |
| --------------------------------- |
| |
| CMA (standing for contiguous memory allocator) is really a bit an accident of |
| what these were used for first, a much better name would be DMA helpers. In the |
| text these should even be called coherent DMA memory helpers (so maybe CDM, but |
| no one knows what that means) since underneath they just use dma_alloc_coherent. |
| |
| Contact: Laurent Pinchart, Daniel Vetter |
| |
| Level: Intermediate (mostly because it is a huge tasks without good partial |
| milestones, not technically itself that challenging) |
| |
| Convert direct mode.vrefresh accesses to use drm_mode_vrefresh() |
| ---------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
| drm_display_mode.vrefresh isn't guaranteed to be populated. As such, using it |
| is risky and has been known to cause div-by-zero bugs. Fortunately, drm core |
| has helper which will use mode.vrefresh if it's !0 and will calculate it from |
| the timings when it's 0. |
| |
| Use simple search/replace, or (more fun) cocci to replace instances of direct |
| vrefresh access with a call to the helper. Check out |
| https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2019-January/205186.html for |
| inspiration. |
| |
| Once all instances of vrefresh have been converted, remove vrefresh from |
| drm_display_mode to avoid future use. |
| |
| Contact: Sean Paul |
| |
| Level: Starter |
| |
| Remove drm_display_mode.hsync |
| ----------------------------- |
| |
| We have drm_mode_hsync() to calculate this from hsync_start/end, since drivers |
| shouldn't/don't use this, remove this member to avoid any temptations to use it |
| in the future. If there is any debug code using drm_display_mode.hsync, convert |
| it to use drm_mode_hsync() instead. |
| |
| Contact: Sean Paul |
| |
| Level: Starter |
| |
| connector register/unregister fixes |
| ----------------------------------- |
| |
| - For most connectors it's a no-op to call drm_connector_register/unregister |
| directly from driver code, drm_dev_register/unregister take care of this |
| already. We can remove all of them. |
| |
| - For dp drivers it's a bit more a mess, since we need the connector to be |
| registered when calling drm_dp_aux_register. Fix this by instead calling |
| drm_dp_aux_init, and moving the actual registering into a late_register |
| callback as recommended in the kerneldoc. |
| |
| Level: Intermediate |
| |
| Remove load/unload callbacks from all non-DRIVER_LEGACY drivers |
| --------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
| The load/unload callbacks in struct &drm_driver are very much midlayers, plus |
| for historical reasons they get the ordering wrong (and we can't fix that) |
| between setting up the &drm_driver structure and calling drm_dev_register(). |
| |
| - Rework drivers to no longer use the load/unload callbacks, directly coding the |
| load/unload sequence into the driver's probe function. |
| |
| - Once all non-DRIVER_LEGACY drivers are converted, disallow the load/unload |
| callbacks for all modern drivers. |
| |
| Contact: Daniel Vetter |
| |
| Level: Intermediate |
| |
| Replace drm_detect_hdmi_monitor() with drm_display_info.is_hdmi |
| --------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
| Once EDID is parsed, the monitor HDMI support information is available through |
| drm_display_info.is_hdmi. Many drivers still call drm_detect_hdmi_monitor() to |
| retrieve the same information, which is less efficient. |
| |
| Audit each individual driver calling drm_detect_hdmi_monitor() and switch to |
| drm_display_info.is_hdmi if applicable. |
| |
| Contact: Laurent Pinchart, respective driver maintainers |
| |
| Level: Intermediate |
| |
| Core refactorings |
| ================= |
| |
| Make panic handling work |
| ------------------------ |
| |
| This is a really varied tasks with lots of little bits and pieces: |
| |
| * The panic path can't be tested currently, leading to constant breaking. The |
| main issue here is that panics can be triggered from hardirq contexts and |
| hence all panic related callback can run in hardirq context. It would be |
| awesome if we could test at least the fbdev helper code and driver code by |
| e.g. trigger calls through drm debugfs files. hardirq context could be |
| achieved by using an IPI to the local processor. |
| |
| * There's a massive confusion of different panic handlers. DRM fbdev emulation |
| helpers have one, but on top of that the fbcon code itself also has one. We |
| need to make sure that they stop fighting over each another. |
| |
| * ``drm_can_sleep()`` is a mess. It hides real bugs in normal operations and |
| isn't a full solution for panic paths. We need to make sure that it only |
| returns true if there's a panic going on for real, and fix up all the |
| fallout. |
| |
| * The panic handler must never sleep, which also means it can't ever |
| ``mutex_lock()``. Also it can't grab any other lock unconditionally, not |
| even spinlocks (because NMI and hardirq can panic too). We need to either |
| make sure to not call such paths, or trylock everything. Really tricky. |
| |
| * For the above locking troubles reasons it's pretty much impossible to |
| attempt a synchronous modeset from panic handlers. The only thing we could |
| try to achive is an atomic ``set_base`` of the primary plane, and hope that |
| it shows up. Everything else probably needs to be delayed to some worker or |
| something else which happens later on. Otherwise it just kills the box |
| harder, prevent the panic from going out on e.g. netconsole. |
| |
| * There's also proposal for a simplied DRM console instead of the full-blown |
| fbcon and DRM fbdev emulation. Any kind of panic handling tricks should |
| obviously work for both console, in case we ever get kmslog merged. |
| |
| Contact: Daniel Vetter |
| |
| Level: Advanced |
| |
| Clean up the debugfs support |
| ---------------------------- |
| |
| There's a bunch of issues with it: |
| |
| - The drm_info_list ->show() function doesn't even bother to cast to the drm |
| structure for you. This is lazy. |
| |
| - We probably want to have some support for debugfs files on crtc/connectors and |
| maybe other kms objects directly in core. There's even drm_print support in |
| the funcs for these objects to dump kms state, so it's all there. And then the |
| ->show() functions should obviously give you a pointer to the right object. |
| |
| - The drm_info_list stuff is centered on drm_minor instead of drm_device. For |
| anything we want to print drm_device (or maybe drm_file) is the right thing. |
| |
| - The drm_driver->debugfs_init hooks we have is just an artifact of the old |
| midlayered load sequence. DRM debugfs should work more like sysfs, where you |
| can create properties/files for an object anytime you want, and the core |
| takes care of publishing/unpuplishing all the files at register/unregister |
| time. Drivers shouldn't need to worry about these technicalities, and fixing |
| this (together with the drm_minor->drm_device move) would allow us to remove |
| debugfs_init. |
| |
| - Drop the return code and error checking from all debugfs functions. Greg KH is |
| working on this already. |
| |
| Contact: Daniel Vetter |
| |
| Level: Intermediate |
| |
| KMS cleanups |
| ------------ |
| |
| Some of these date from the very introduction of KMS in 2008 ... |
| |
| - Make ->funcs and ->helper_private vtables optional. There's a bunch of empty |
| function tables in drivers, but before we can remove them we need to make sure |
| that all the users in helpers and drivers do correctly check for a NULL |
| vtable. |
| |
| - Cleanup up the various ->destroy callbacks. A lot of them just wrapt the |
| drm_*_cleanup implementations and can be removed. Some tack a kfree() at the |
| end, for which we could add drm_*_cleanup_kfree(). And then there's the (for |
| historical reasons) misnamed drm_primary_helper_destroy() function. |
| |
| Level: Intermediate |
| |
| Better Testing |
| ============== |
| |
| Enable trinity for DRM |
| ---------------------- |
| |
| And fix up the fallout. Should be really interesting ... |
| |
| Level: Advanced |
| |
| Make KMS tests in i-g-t generic |
| ------------------------------- |
| |
| The i915 driver team maintains an extensive testsuite for the i915 DRM driver, |
| including tons of testcases for corner-cases in the modesetting API. It would |
| be awesome if those tests (at least the ones not relying on Intel-specific GEM |
| features) could be made to run on any KMS driver. |
| |
| Basic work to run i-g-t tests on non-i915 is done, what's now missing is mass- |
| converting things over. For modeset tests we also first need a bit of |
| infrastructure to use dumb buffers for untiled buffers, to be able to run all |
| the non-i915 specific modeset tests. |
| |
| Level: Advanced |
| |
| Extend virtual test driver (VKMS) |
| --------------------------------- |
| |
| See the documentation of :ref:`VKMS <vkms>` for more details. This is an ideal |
| internship task, since it only requires a virtual machine and can be sized to |
| fit the available time. |
| |
| Contact: Daniel Vetter |
| |
| Level: See details |
| |
| Backlight Refactoring |
| --------------------- |
| |
| Backlight drivers have a triple enable/disable state, which is a bit overkill. |
| Plan to fix this: |
| |
| 1. Roll out backlight_enable() and backlight_disable() helpers everywhere. This |
| has started already. |
| 2. In all, only look at one of the three status bits set by the above helpers. |
| 3. Remove the other two status bits. |
| |
| Contact: Daniel Vetter |
| |
| Level: Intermediate |
| |
| Driver Specific |
| =============== |
| |
| AMD DC Display Driver |
| --------------------- |
| |
| AMD DC is the display driver for AMD devices starting with Vega. There has been |
| a bunch of progress cleaning it up but there's still plenty of work to be done. |
| |
| See drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/TODO for tasks. |
| |
| Contact: Harry Wentland, Alex Deucher |
| |
| Bootsplash |
| ========== |
| |
| There is support in place now for writing internal DRM clients making it |
| possible to pick up the bootsplash work that was rejected because it was written |
| for fbdev. |
| |
| - [v6,8/8] drm/client: Hack: Add bootsplash example |
| https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/306579/ |
| |
| - [RFC PATCH v2 00/13] Kernel based bootsplash |
| https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/13/764 |
| |
| Contact: Sam Ravnborg |
| |
| Level: Advanced |
| |
| Outside DRM |
| =========== |
| |
| Convert fbdev drivers to DRM |
| ---------------------------- |
| |
| There are plenty of fbdev drivers for older hardware. Some hwardware has |
| become obsolete, but some still provides good(-enough) framebuffers. The |
| drivers that are still useful should be converted to DRM and afterwards |
| removed from fbdev. |
| |
| Very simple fbdev drivers can best be converted by starting with a new |
| DRM driver. Simple KMS helpers and SHMEM should be able to handle any |
| existing hardware. The new driver's call-back functions are filled from |
| existing fbdev code. |
| |
| More complex fbdev drivers can be refactored step-by-step into a DRM |
| driver with the help of the DRM fbconv helpers. [1] These helpers provide |
| the transition layer between the DRM core infrastructure and the fbdev |
| driver interface. Create a new DRM driver on top of the fbconv helpers, |
| copy over the fbdev driver, and hook it up to the DRM code. Examples for |
| several fbdev drivers are available at [1] and a tutorial of this process |
| available at [2]. The result is a primitive DRM driver that can run X11 |
| and Weston. |
| |
| - [1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/tzimmermann/linux/tree/fbconv |
| - [2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/tzimmermann/linux/blob/fbconv/drivers/gpu/drm/drm_fbconv_helper.c |
| |
| Contact: Thomas Zimmermann <tzimmermann@suse.de> |
| |
| Level: Advanced |
