Hi,
So if i do not start the discussion now it might be already too late. Given plan to converge open source driver and closed source driver to use a single common kernel driver and that this would be a new kernel driver. This is an opportunity to fix some of the radeon design issues (at least things that i would have done differently if only i could get some gas for my DeLorean).
Among the thing that i will not do is the chunk stuff associated with cs ioctl. I find it ugly, if my memory serve me well i was trying to be future proof and allow the cs ioctl to be extended. While this original aim have been somewhat successfully, i think it was the wrong day to do it.
My lastest (and what i still believe to be a good idea until proven wrong), is to change the way we do ioctl and use a little trick. This idea was also spark by the continuous additions we do to info ioctl which is getting ugly.
So idea is simple, each ioctl would use some struct like :
struct radeon_ioctl { u32 version; u32 size; };
The version field is the key here, think of it as an index into an array of ioctl dispatch functions. So something like :
struct radeon_ioctls { int (*iotcl)[MAX_IOCTL_NUM](void *data, ...); };
struct radeon_ioctls rdispatch_ioctls[N];
And now all ioctl go through this single entry point :
int radeon_ioctl_stub(int ioctl, void *data, ...) { struct radeon_ioctl *rio = data;
return rdispatch_ioctls[rio->version][ioctl](data, ...); }
So this is rough idea but the point is that we can do proper ioctl versioning and have separate functions for each new versions and avoid ioctl cruft, or at least this is the theory.
The two things this gave us, is feedback from userspace as we the version the kernel will know which version of userspace it is dealing with. The others one is that it does allow you to introduce a completely new API either for new generation of hardware or just as an evolution. And small bonus is that it does allow to slowly phase out API that we consider broken (ioctl per ioctl).
So this is the main design change that i would do. I should probably rought up something that goes deeper for the cs ioctl.
Cheers, Jérôme