On Fri, 11 Dec 2020 14:39:35 +0000 Simon Ser contact@emersion.fr wrote:
On Friday, December 11th, 2020 at 2:50 PM, Pekka Paalanen ppaalanen@gmail.com wrote:
is there a reason why one cannot have more primary planes than CRTCs in existence?
Daniel implied that in 20201209003637.GK401619@phenom.ffwll.local, but I didn't get the reason for it yet.
E.g. if all your planes are interchangeable in the sense that you can turn on a CRTC with any one of them, would one not then expose all the planes as "Primary"?
I'm thinking of primary as a hint for simple user-space: "you can likely light up a CRTC if you attach this plane and don't do anything crazy". For anything more complicated, user-space uses atomic commits and can completely ignore whether a plane is primary, cursor or overlay.
That's a nice reason, do we have those written down anywhere?
- plane type "Primary" is a hint to userspace that using this plane alone on a CRTC has the highest probability of being able to turn on the CRTC
- plane types are just a hint to userspace, userspace can and *should* use atomic test_only commits to discover more ways of making use of the planes (note: if this applies to cursor planes, it will invalidate some "optimizations" that virtual hardware drivers like vmwgfx(?) might do by having the cursor plane position controller directly from the host rather than looped through the guest)
If the planes have other differences, like supported formats or scaling, then marking them all "Primary" would let userspace know that it can pick any plane with the suitable properties and expect to turn on the CRTC with it.
That's interesting, but I'd bet no user-space does that. If new user-space wants to, it's better to rely on test-only commits instead.
Ok. So plane types are not a good reason to prune a compositor's testing matrix to avoid testing some combinations.
Or does marking a plane as "Primary" imply something else too, like "cannot scale"? I think Weston does make this assumption in an attempt to hit fewer causes for failure.
No, AFAIK "Primary" doesn't imply something else, e.g. on amdgpu you can do scaling on the primary plane.
Thanks, pq