linux-kernel - Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] staging: remove fbdev drivers

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Date:   Fri, 9 Dec 2016 09:04:55 +0100
From:   Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@...ux-m68k.org>
To:     Dave Airlie <airlied@...il.com>
Cc:     Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@...nel.crashing.org>,
        Daniel Vetter <daniel@...ll.ch>,
        Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@...e-electrons.com>,
        Linux Fbdev development list <linux-fbdev@...r.kernel.org>,
        Teddy Wang <teddy.wang@...iconmotion.com>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        dri-devel <dri-devel@...ts.freedesktop.org>,
        Tomi Valkeinen <tomi.valkeinen@...com>,
        Sudip Mukherjee <sudipm.mukherjee@...il.com>,
        Arnaud Patard <arnaud.patard@...-net.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] staging: remove fbdev drivers

Hi Dave,

On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 1:08 AM, Dave Airlie <airlied@...il.com> wrote:
> On 9 December 2016 at 07:28, Benjamin Herrenschmidt
> <benh@...nel.crashing.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, 2016-12-08 at 11:10 +0100, Daniel Vetter wrote:
>>> > With drmfb you basically have to shadow everything into memory & copy
>>> > over everything, and locks you out of simple 2D accel. For a simple text
>>> > console the result is orders of magnitude slower and memory hungry than
>>> > a simple fbdev.
>>>
>>> Not true, we have full fbdev emulation, and drivers can implement the 2d
>>> accel in there. And a bunch of them do. It's just that most teams decided
>>> that this is pointless waste of their time.j
>>
>> Ok so my knowledge might be outdated here. I was complaining to Dave about
>> how cirrusdrmfb didn't even use blits for fbcon scrolling and always double
>> buffered everything, and Dave made the point that you basically had to do
>> that for security reasons that I mostly forgot the details of.
>>
>> It looks like bochsdrmfb and astdrmfb are the same. If things have changed,
>> then cool. Can you point me to a drmfb driver that is a good (and not too
>> complex) example with simple 2d accel ? I'm thinking mostly of color
>> expansion, bitblt and solid fill for fbcon, the way I used to do it in
>> radeonfb for example.
>
> What are people using fbcon for that needs acceleration, this is where I get
> a bit lost.
>
> It's a console, if you aren't sshing into the machine.
>
> It's main purpose should just be for gathering oopses and you've a lot better
> chance of getting an oops if you don't have some sketchy gpu accel in the way.

Unless you're using the console as a text console, and don't run e.g. X on top.

> The acceleration that most of the 2D things provide isn't ever that
> great, and shadowing is a lot more effective if done properly. It's a feature
> that kernel ppl obsess over but I don't get a lot of real world feedback,
> (booting 9000 scsi nodes with debug on takes a long time was possibly
> something I heard once, and I think we resolved).

It all depends on the complex balance between GPU performance, CPU performance,
CPU-to-frame buffer bandwidth, and amount of available system RAM.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@...ux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds