DRM-lease-3

Tue, 30 May 2017 01:41:22 -0700
tags/fdo

DRM leasing part three (Vulkan)

With the kernel APIs off for review, and the X RandR bits looking like they're in reasonable shape, I finally found some time to sit down and figure out how I wanted to integrate this into Vulkan.

Avoiding two DRM file descriptors

Given that a DRM lease is represented by a DRM master file descriptor, we want to use that for all of the operations in the driver, including rendering and mode setting. Using the vulkan driver render node and the lease master node together would require passing buffer objects between the kernel contexts using even more file descriptors.

The Mesa Vulkan drivers open the device nodes while enumerating devices, not when they are created. This seems a bit early to me, but it makes sure that the devices being enumerated are actually available for use, and not just present in the system. To replace the render node fd with the lease master fd means hooking into the system early enough that the enumeration code can see the lease fd. And that means creating an instance extension as the instance gets created before devices are enumerated.

The VK_KEITHP_kms_display instance extension

This simple instance extension provides the necessary hooks to get the lease information from the application down into the driver before the DRM node is opened. In the first implementation, I added a function that could be called before the devices were enumerated to save the information in the Vulkan loader. That worked, but required quite a bit of study of the Vulkan loader and its XML description of the full Vulkan API.

Mark Young suggested that a simpler plan would be to chain the information into the VkInstanceCreateInfo pNext field; with no new APIs added to Vulkan, there shouldn't be any need to change the Vulkan loader -- the device driver would advertise the new instance extension and the application could find it.

That would have worked great, except the Vulkan loader 'helpfully' elides all instance extensions it doesn't know about before returning the list to the application. I'd say this was a bug and should be fixed, but for now, I've gone ahead and added the few necessary definitions to the loader to make it work.

In the application, it's a simple matter of searching for this extension, constructing the VkKmsDisplayInfoKEITHP structure, chaining that into the VkInstanceCreateInfo pNext list and passing that in to the vkCreateInstance call.

typedef struct VkKmsDisplayInfoKEITHP {
    VkStructureType         sType;  /* VK_STRUCTURE_TYPE_KMS_DISPLAY_INFO_KEITHP */
    const void*             pNext;
    int                     fd;
    uint32_t                crtc_id;
    uint32_t                *connector_ids;
    int                     connector_count;
    drmModeModeInfoPtr      mode;
} VkKmsDisplayInfoKEITHP;

As you can see, this includes the master file descriptor along with all of the information necessary to set the desired video mode using the specified resources.

The driver just walks the pNext list from the VkInstanceCreateInfo structure looking for any provided VkKmsDisplayInfoKEITHP structure and pulls the data out.

To avoid questions about file descriptor lifetimes, the driver dup's the provided fd. The application is expected to close their copy at a suitable time.

The VK_KHR_display extension

Vulkan already has an API for directly accessing the raw device, including code for exposing video modes and everything. As tempting as it may be to just go do something simpler, there's a lot to be said for using existing APIs.

This extension doesn't provide any direct APIs for acquiring display resources, relying on the VK_EXT_acquire_xlib_display extension for that part. And that takes a VkPhysicalDisplay parameter, which is only available after the device is opened, which is why I created the VK_KEITHP_kms_display extension instead of just using the VK_EXT_acquire_xlib_display extension -- we can't increase the capabilities of the render node opened by the driver, and we don't want to keep two file descriptors around.

With the information provided by the VK_KEITHP_kms_display extension, we can implement all of the VK_KHR_display extension APIs, including enumerating planes and modes and creating the necessary display surface. Of course, there's only one plane and one mode, so some of the implementation is pretty simplistic.

The big piece of work was to create the swap chain structure and associated frame buffers.

A working example

I've taken the 'cube' example from the Vulkan loader and hacked it up to use XCB to construct a DRM lease, the VK_KEITHP_kms_display extension to pass that lease into the Vulkan driver. The existing support for the VK_KHR_display extension "just worked", which was pretty satisfying.

It's a bit of a mess

I'm not satisfied with the mesa code at this point; there's a bunch of code in the radeon driver which should be in the vulkan WSI bits, and the vulkan WSI bits should probably not have the KMS interfaces wired in. I'll ask around and see what other Mesa developers think I should do before restructuring it further; I'll probably have to rewrite it all at least one more time before it's ready to upstream.

Seeing the code

I'll be cleaning the code up a bit before sending it out for review, but it's already visible in my own repositories:

mesa: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/~keithp/mesa/log/?h=drm-leases

Vulkan Loader: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/~keithp/Vulkan-LoaderAndValidationLayers/log/?h=drm-leases

demo: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/~keithp/jesse-cube/log/