xref: /linux/Documentation/gpu/todo.rst (revision 24bce201d79807b668bf9d9e0aca801c5c0d5f78)
1.. _todo:
2
3=========
4TODO list
5=========
6
7This section contains a list of smaller janitorial tasks in the kernel DRM
8graphics subsystem useful as newbie projects. Or for slow rainy days.
9
10Difficulty
11----------
12
13To make it easier task are categorized into different levels:
14
15Starter: Good tasks to get started with the DRM subsystem.
16
17Intermediate: Tasks which need some experience with working in the DRM
18subsystem, or some specific GPU/display graphics knowledge. For debugging issue
19it's good to have the relevant hardware (or a virtual driver set up) available
20for testing.
21
22Advanced: Tricky tasks that need fairly good understanding of the DRM subsystem
23and graphics topics. Generally need the relevant hardware for development and
24testing.
25
26Expert: Only attempt these if you've successfully completed some tricky
27refactorings already and are an expert in the specific area
28
29Subsystem-wide refactorings
30===========================
31
32Remove custom dumb_map_offset implementations
33---------------------------------------------
34
35All GEM based drivers should be using drm_gem_create_mmap_offset() instead.
36Audit each individual driver, make sure it'll work with the generic
37implementation (there's lots of outdated locking leftovers in various
38implementations), and then remove it.
39
40Contact: Daniel Vetter, respective driver maintainers
41
42Level: Intermediate
43
44Convert existing KMS drivers to atomic modesetting
45--------------------------------------------------
46
473.19 has the atomic modeset interfaces and helpers, so drivers can now be
48converted over. Modern compositors like Wayland or Surfaceflinger on Android
49really want an atomic modeset interface, so this is all about the bright
50future.
51
52There is a conversion guide for atomic and all you need is a GPU for a
53non-converted driver (again virtual HW drivers for KVM are still all
54suitable).
55
56As part of this drivers also need to convert to universal plane (which means
57exposing primary & cursor as proper plane objects). But that's much easier to
58do by directly using the new atomic helper driver callbacks.
59
60Contact: Daniel Vetter, respective driver maintainers
61
62Level: Advanced
63
64Clean up the clipped coordination confusion around planes
65---------------------------------------------------------
66
67We have a helper to get this right with drm_plane_helper_check_update(), but
68it's not consistently used. This should be fixed, preferrably in the atomic
69helpers (and drivers then moved over to clipped coordinates). Probably the
70helper should also be moved from drm_plane_helper.c to the atomic helpers, to
71avoid confusion - the other helpers in that file are all deprecated legacy
72helpers.
73
74Contact: Ville Syrjälä, Daniel Vetter, driver maintainers
75
76Level: Advanced
77
78Improve plane atomic_check helpers
79----------------------------------
80
81Aside from the clipped coordinates right above there's a few suboptimal things
82with the current helpers:
83
84- drm_plane_helper_funcs->atomic_check gets called for enabled or disabled
85  planes. At best this seems to confuse drivers, worst it means they blow up
86  when the plane is disabled without the CRTC. The only special handling is
87  resetting values in the plane state structures, which instead should be moved
88  into the drm_plane_funcs->atomic_duplicate_state functions.
89
90- Once that's done, helpers could stop calling ->atomic_check for disabled
91  planes.
92
93- Then we could go through all the drivers and remove the more-or-less confused
94  checks for plane_state->fb and plane_state->crtc.
95
96Contact: Daniel Vetter
97
98Level: Advanced
99
100Convert early atomic drivers to async commit helpers
101----------------------------------------------------
102
103For the first year the atomic modeset helpers didn't support asynchronous /
104nonblocking commits, and every driver had to hand-roll them. This is fixed
105now, but there's still a pile of existing drivers that easily could be
106converted over to the new infrastructure.
107
108One issue with the helpers is that they require that drivers handle completion
109events for atomic commits correctly. But fixing these bugs is good anyway.
110
111Somewhat related is the legacy_cursor_update hack, which should be replaced with
112the new atomic_async_check/commit functionality in the helpers in drivers that
113still look at that flag.
114
115Contact: Daniel Vetter, respective driver maintainers
116
117Level: Advanced
118
119Fallout from atomic KMS
120-----------------------
121
122``drm_atomic_helper.c`` provides a batch of functions which implement legacy
123IOCTLs on top of the new atomic driver interface. Which is really nice for
124gradual conversion of drivers, but unfortunately the semantic mismatches are
125a bit too severe. So there's some follow-up work to adjust the function
126interfaces to fix these issues:
127
128* atomic needs the lock acquire context. At the moment that's passed around
129  implicitly with some horrible hacks, and it's also allocate with
130  ``GFP_NOFAIL`` behind the scenes. All legacy paths need to start allocating
131  the acquire context explicitly on stack and then also pass it down into
132  drivers explicitly so that the legacy-on-atomic functions can use them.
133
134  Except for some driver code this is done. This task should be finished by
135  adding WARN_ON(!drm_drv_uses_atomic_modeset) in drm_modeset_lock_all().
136
137* A bunch of the vtable hooks are now in the wrong place: DRM has a split
138  between core vfunc tables (named ``drm_foo_funcs``), which are used to
139  implement the userspace ABI. And then there's the optional hooks for the
140  helper libraries (name ``drm_foo_helper_funcs``), which are purely for
141  internal use. Some of these hooks should be move from ``_funcs`` to
142  ``_helper_funcs`` since they are not part of the core ABI. There's a
143  ``FIXME`` comment in the kerneldoc for each such case in ``drm_crtc.h``.
144
145Contact: Daniel Vetter
146
147Level: Intermediate
148
149Get rid of dev->struct_mutex from GEM drivers
150---------------------------------------------
151
152``dev->struct_mutex`` is the Big DRM Lock from legacy days and infested
153everything. Nowadays in modern drivers the only bit where it's mandatory is
154serializing GEM buffer object destruction. Which unfortunately means drivers
155have to keep track of that lock and either call ``unreference`` or
156``unreference_locked`` depending upon context.
157
158Core GEM doesn't have a need for ``struct_mutex`` any more since kernel 4.8,
159and there's a GEM object ``free`` callback for any drivers which are
160entirely ``struct_mutex`` free.
161
162For drivers that need ``struct_mutex`` it should be replaced with a driver-
163private lock. The tricky part is the BO free functions, since those can't
164reliably take that lock any more. Instead state needs to be protected with
165suitable subordinate locks or some cleanup work pushed to a worker thread. For
166performance-critical drivers it might also be better to go with a more
167fine-grained per-buffer object and per-context lockings scheme. Currently only
168the ``msm`` and `i915` drivers use ``struct_mutex``.
169
170Contact: Daniel Vetter, respective driver maintainers
171
172Level: Advanced
173
174Move Buffer Object Locking to dma_resv_lock()
175---------------------------------------------
176
177Many drivers have their own per-object locking scheme, usually using
178mutex_lock(). This causes all kinds of trouble for buffer sharing, since
179depending which driver is the exporter and importer, the locking hierarchy is
180reversed.
181
182To solve this we need one standard per-object locking mechanism, which is
183dma_resv_lock(). This lock needs to be called as the outermost lock, with all
184other driver specific per-object locks removed. The problem is tha rolling out
185the actual change to the locking contract is a flag day, due to struct dma_buf
186buffer sharing.
187
188Level: Expert
189
190Convert logging to drm_* functions with drm_device paramater
191------------------------------------------------------------
192
193For drivers which could have multiple instances, it is necessary to
194differentiate between which is which in the logs. Since DRM_INFO/WARN/ERROR
195don't do this, drivers used dev_info/warn/err to make this differentiation. We
196now have drm_* variants of the drm print functions, so we can start to convert
197those drivers back to using drm-formatted specific log messages.
198
199Before you start this conversion please contact the relevant maintainers to make
200sure your work will be merged - not everyone agrees that the DRM dmesg macros
201are better.
202
203Contact: Sean Paul, Maintainer of the driver you plan to convert
204
205Level: Starter
206
207Convert drivers to use simple modeset suspend/resume
208----------------------------------------------------
209
210Most drivers (except i915 and nouveau) that use
211drm_atomic_helper_suspend/resume() can probably be converted to use
212drm_mode_config_helper_suspend/resume(). Also there's still open-coded version
213of the atomic suspend/resume code in older atomic modeset drivers.
214
215Contact: Maintainer of the driver you plan to convert
216
217Level: Intermediate
218
219Convert drivers to use drm_fbdev_generic_setup()
220------------------------------------------------
221
222Most drivers can use drm_fbdev_generic_setup(). Driver have to implement
223atomic modesetting and GEM vmap support. Historically, generic fbdev emulation
224expected the framebuffer in system memory or system-like memory. By employing
225struct iosys_map, drivers with frambuffers in I/O memory can be supported
226as well.
227
228Contact: Maintainer of the driver you plan to convert
229
230Level: Intermediate
231
232Reimplement functions in drm_fbdev_fb_ops without fbdev
233-------------------------------------------------------
234
235A number of callback functions in drm_fbdev_fb_ops could benefit from
236being rewritten without dependencies on the fbdev module. Some of the
237helpers could further benefit from using struct iosys_map instead of
238raw pointers.
239
240Contact: Thomas Zimmermann <tzimmermann@suse.de>, Daniel Vetter
241
242Level: Advanced
243
244Benchmark and optimize blitting and format-conversion function
245--------------------------------------------------------------
246
247Drawing to dispay memory quickly is crucial for many applications'
248performance.
249
250On at least x86-64, sys_imageblit() is significantly slower than
251cfb_imageblit(), even though both use the same blitting algorithm and
252the latter is written for I/O memory. It turns out that cfb_imageblit()
253uses movl instructions, while sys_imageblit apparently does not. This
254seems to be a problem with gcc's optimizer. DRM's format-conversion
255helpers might be subject to similar issues.
256
257Benchmark and optimize fbdev's sys_() helpers and DRM's format-conversion
258helpers. In cases that can be further optimized, maybe implement a different
259algorithm. For micro-optimizations, use movl/movq instructions explicitly.
260That might possibly require architecture-specific helpers (e.g., storel()
261storeq()).
262
263Contact: Thomas Zimmermann <tzimmermann@suse.de>
264
265Level: Intermediate
266
267drm_framebuffer_funcs and drm_mode_config_funcs.fb_create cleanup
268-----------------------------------------------------------------
269
270A lot more drivers could be switched over to the drm_gem_framebuffer helpers.
271Various hold-ups:
272
273- Need to switch over to the generic dirty tracking code using
274  drm_atomic_helper_dirtyfb first (e.g. qxl).
275
276- Need to switch to drm_fbdev_generic_setup(), otherwise a lot of the custom fb
277  setup code can't be deleted.
278
279- Many drivers wrap drm_gem_fb_create() only to check for valid formats. For
280  atomic drivers we could check for valid formats by calling
281  drm_plane_check_pixel_format() against all planes, and pass if any plane
282  supports the format. For non-atomic that's not possible since like the format
283  list for the primary plane is fake and we'd therefor reject valid formats.
284
285- Many drivers subclass drm_framebuffer, we'd need a embedding compatible
286  version of the varios drm_gem_fb_create functions. Maybe called
287  drm_gem_fb_create/_with_dirty/_with_funcs as needed.
288
289Contact: Daniel Vetter
290
291Level: Intermediate
292
293Generic fbdev defio support
294---------------------------
295
296The defio support code in the fbdev core has some very specific requirements,
297which means drivers need to have a special framebuffer for fbdev. The main
298issue is that it uses some fields in struct page itself, which breaks shmem
299gem objects (and other things). To support defio, affected drivers require
300the use of a shadow buffer, which may add CPU and memory overhead.
301
302Possible solution would be to write our own defio mmap code in the drm fbdev
303emulation. It would need to fully wrap the existing mmap ops, forwarding
304everything after it has done the write-protect/mkwrite trickery:
305
306- In the drm_fbdev_fb_mmap helper, if we need defio, change the
307  default page prots to write-protected with something like this::
308
309      vma->vm_page_prot = pgprot_wrprotect(vma->vm_page_prot);
310
311- Set the mkwrite and fsync callbacks with similar implementions to the core
312  fbdev defio stuff. These should all work on plain ptes, they don't actually
313  require a struct page.  uff. These should all work on plain ptes, they don't
314  actually require a struct page.
315
316- Track the dirty pages in a separate structure (bitfield with one bit per page
317  should work) to avoid clobbering struct page.
318
319Might be good to also have some igt testcases for this.
320
321Contact: Daniel Vetter, Noralf Tronnes
322
323Level: Advanced
324
325idr_init_base()
326---------------
327
328DRM core&drivers uses a lot of idr (integer lookup directories) for mapping
329userspace IDs to internal objects, and in most places ID=0 means NULL and hence
330is never used. Switching to idr_init_base() for these would make the idr more
331efficient.
332
333Contact: Daniel Vetter
334
335Level: Starter
336
337struct drm_gem_object_funcs
338---------------------------
339
340GEM objects can now have a function table instead of having the callbacks on the
341DRM driver struct. This is now the preferred way. Callbacks in drivers have been
342converted, except for struct drm_driver.gem_prime_mmap.
343
344Level: Intermediate
345
346Rename CMA helpers to DMA helpers
347---------------------------------
348
349CMA (standing for contiguous memory allocator) is really a bit an accident of
350what these were used for first, a much better name would be DMA helpers. In the
351text these should even be called coherent DMA memory helpers (so maybe CDM, but
352no one knows what that means) since underneath they just use dma_alloc_coherent.
353
354Contact: Laurent Pinchart, Daniel Vetter
355
356Level: Intermediate (mostly because it is a huge tasks without good partial
357milestones, not technically itself that challenging)
358
359connector register/unregister fixes
360-----------------------------------
361
362- For most connectors it's a no-op to call drm_connector_register/unregister
363  directly from driver code, drm_dev_register/unregister take care of this
364  already. We can remove all of them.
365
366- For dp drivers it's a bit more a mess, since we need the connector to be
367  registered when calling drm_dp_aux_register. Fix this by instead calling
368  drm_dp_aux_init, and moving the actual registering into a late_register
369  callback as recommended in the kerneldoc.
370
371Level: Intermediate
372
373Remove load/unload callbacks from all non-DRIVER_LEGACY drivers
374---------------------------------------------------------------
375
376The load/unload callbacks in struct &drm_driver are very much midlayers, plus
377for historical reasons they get the ordering wrong (and we can't fix that)
378between setting up the &drm_driver structure and calling drm_dev_register().
379
380- Rework drivers to no longer use the load/unload callbacks, directly coding the
381  load/unload sequence into the driver's probe function.
382
383- Once all non-DRIVER_LEGACY drivers are converted, disallow the load/unload
384  callbacks for all modern drivers.
385
386Contact: Daniel Vetter
387
388Level: Intermediate
389
390Replace drm_detect_hdmi_monitor() with drm_display_info.is_hdmi
391---------------------------------------------------------------
392
393Once EDID is parsed, the monitor HDMI support information is available through
394drm_display_info.is_hdmi. Many drivers still call drm_detect_hdmi_monitor() to
395retrieve the same information, which is less efficient.
396
397Audit each individual driver calling drm_detect_hdmi_monitor() and switch to
398drm_display_info.is_hdmi if applicable.
399
400Contact: Laurent Pinchart, respective driver maintainers
401
402Level: Intermediate
403
404Consolidate custom driver modeset properties
405--------------------------------------------
406
407Before atomic modeset took place, many drivers where creating their own
408properties. Among other things, atomic brought the requirement that custom,
409driver specific properties should not be used.
410
411For this task, we aim to introduce core helpers or reuse the existing ones
412if available:
413
414A quick, unconfirmed, examples list.
415
416Introduce core helpers:
417- audio (amdgpu, intel, gma500, radeon)
418- brightness, contrast, etc (armada, nouveau) - overlay only (?)
419- broadcast rgb (gma500, intel)
420- colorkey (armada, nouveau, rcar) - overlay only (?)
421- dither (amdgpu, nouveau, radeon) - varies across drivers
422- underscan family (amdgpu, radeon, nouveau)
423
424Already in core:
425- colorspace (sti)
426- tv format names, enhancements (gma500, intel)
427- tv overscan, margins, etc. (gma500, intel)
428- zorder (omapdrm) - same as zpos (?)
429
430
431Contact: Emil Velikov, respective driver maintainers
432
433Level: Intermediate
434
435Use struct iosys_map throughout codebase
436----------------------------------------
437
438Pointers to shared device memory are stored in struct iosys_map. Each
439instance knows whether it refers to system or I/O memory. Most of the DRM-wide
440interface have been converted to use struct iosys_map, but implementations
441often still use raw pointers.
442
443The task is to use struct iosys_map where it makes sense.
444
445* Memory managers should use struct iosys_map for dma-buf-imported buffers.
446* TTM might benefit from using struct iosys_map internally.
447* Framebuffer copying and blitting helpers should operate on struct iosys_map.
448
449Contact: Thomas Zimmermann <tzimmermann@suse.de>, Christian König, Daniel Vetter
450
451Level: Intermediate
452
453Review all drivers for setting struct drm_mode_config.{max_width,max_height} correctly
454--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
455
456The values in struct drm_mode_config.{max_width,max_height} describe the
457maximum supported framebuffer size. It's the virtual screen size, but many
458drivers treat it like limitations of the physical resolution.
459
460The maximum width depends on the hardware's maximum scanline pitch. The
461maximum height depends on the amount of addressable video memory. Review all
462drivers to initialize the fields to the correct values.
463
464Contact: Thomas Zimmermann <tzimmermann@suse.de>
465
466Level: Intermediate
467
468Request memory regions in all drivers
469-------------------------------------
470
471Go through all drivers and add code to request the memory regions that the
472driver uses. This requires adding calls to request_mem_region(),
473pci_request_region() or similar functions. Use helpers for managed cleanup
474where possible.
475
476Drivers are pretty bad at doing this and there used to be conflicts among
477DRM and fbdev drivers. Still, it's the correct thing to do.
478
479Contact: Thomas Zimmermann <tzimmermann@suse.de>
480
481Level: Starter
482
483
484Core refactorings
485=================
486
487Make panic handling work
488------------------------
489
490This is a really varied tasks with lots of little bits and pieces:
491
492* The panic path can't be tested currently, leading to constant breaking. The
493  main issue here is that panics can be triggered from hardirq contexts and
494  hence all panic related callback can run in hardirq context. It would be
495  awesome if we could test at least the fbdev helper code and driver code by
496  e.g. trigger calls through drm debugfs files. hardirq context could be
497  achieved by using an IPI to the local processor.
498
499* There's a massive confusion of different panic handlers. DRM fbdev emulation
500  helpers had their own (long removed), but on top of that the fbcon code itself
501  also has one. We need to make sure that they stop fighting over each other.
502  This is worked around by checking ``oops_in_progress`` at various entry points
503  into the DRM fbdev emulation helpers. A much cleaner approach here would be to
504  switch fbcon to the `threaded printk support
505  <https://lwn.net/Articles/800946/>`_.
506
507* ``drm_can_sleep()`` is a mess. It hides real bugs in normal operations and
508  isn't a full solution for panic paths. We need to make sure that it only
509  returns true if there's a panic going on for real, and fix up all the
510  fallout.
511
512* The panic handler must never sleep, which also means it can't ever
513  ``mutex_lock()``. Also it can't grab any other lock unconditionally, not
514  even spinlocks (because NMI and hardirq can panic too). We need to either
515  make sure to not call such paths, or trylock everything. Really tricky.
516
517* A clean solution would be an entirely separate panic output support in KMS,
518  bypassing the current fbcon support. See `[PATCH v2 0/3] drm: Add panic handling
519  <https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/20190311174218.51899-1-noralf@tronnes.org/>`_.
520
521* Encoding the actual oops and preceding dmesg in a QR might help with the
522  dread "important stuff scrolled away" problem. See `[RFC][PATCH] Oops messages
523  transfer using QR codes
524  <https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1446217392-11981-1-git-send-email-alexandru.murtaza@intel.com/>`_
525  for some example code that could be reused.
526
527Contact: Daniel Vetter
528
529Level: Advanced
530
531Clean up the debugfs support
532----------------------------
533
534There's a bunch of issues with it:
535
536- The drm_info_list ->show() function doesn't even bother to cast to the drm
537  structure for you. This is lazy.
538
539- We probably want to have some support for debugfs files on crtc/connectors and
540  maybe other kms objects directly in core. There's even drm_print support in
541  the funcs for these objects to dump kms state, so it's all there. And then the
542  ->show() functions should obviously give you a pointer to the right object.
543
544- The drm_info_list stuff is centered on drm_minor instead of drm_device. For
545  anything we want to print drm_device (or maybe drm_file) is the right thing.
546
547- The drm_driver->debugfs_init hooks we have is just an artifact of the old
548  midlayered load sequence. DRM debugfs should work more like sysfs, where you
549  can create properties/files for an object anytime you want, and the core
550  takes care of publishing/unpuplishing all the files at register/unregister
551  time. Drivers shouldn't need to worry about these technicalities, and fixing
552  this (together with the drm_minor->drm_device move) would allow us to remove
553  debugfs_init.
554
555Previous RFC that hasn't landed yet: https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/20200513114130.28641-2-wambui.karugax@gmail.com/
556
557Contact: Daniel Vetter
558
559Level: Intermediate
560
561Object lifetime fixes
562---------------------
563
564There's two related issues here
565
566- Cleanup up the various ->destroy callbacks, which often are all the same
567  simple code.
568
569- Lots of drivers erroneously allocate DRM modeset objects using devm_kzalloc,
570  which results in use-after free issues on driver unload. This can be serious
571  trouble even for drivers for hardware integrated on the SoC due to
572  EPROBE_DEFERRED backoff.
573
574Both these problems can be solved by switching over to drmm_kzalloc(), and the
575various convenience wrappers provided, e.g. drmm_crtc_alloc_with_planes(),
576drmm_universal_plane_alloc(), ... and so on.
577
578Contact: Daniel Vetter
579
580Level: Intermediate
581
582Remove automatic page mapping from dma-buf importing
583----------------------------------------------------
584
585When importing dma-bufs, the dma-buf and PRIME frameworks automatically map
586imported pages into the importer's DMA area. drm_gem_prime_fd_to_handle() and
587drm_gem_prime_handle_to_fd() require that importers call dma_buf_attach()
588even if they never do actual device DMA, but only CPU access through
589dma_buf_vmap(). This is a problem for USB devices, which do not support DMA
590operations.
591
592To fix the issue, automatic page mappings should be removed from the
593buffer-sharing code. Fixing this is a bit more involved, since the import/export
594cache is also tied to &drm_gem_object.import_attach. Meanwhile we paper over
595this problem for USB devices by fishing out the USB host controller device, as
596long as that supports DMA. Otherwise importing can still needlessly fail.
597
598Contact: Thomas Zimmermann <tzimmermann@suse.de>, Daniel Vetter
599
600Level: Advanced
601
602
603Better Testing
604==============
605
606Add unit tests using the Kernel Unit Testing (KUnit) framework
607--------------------------------------------------------------
608
609The `KUnit <https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/dev-tools/kunit/index.html>`_
610provides a common framework for unit tests within the Linux kernel. Having a
611test suite would allow to identify regressions earlier.
612
613A good candidate for the first unit tests are the format-conversion helpers in
614``drm_format_helper.c``.
615
616Contact: Javier Martinez Canillas <javierm@redhat.com>
617
618Level: Intermediate
619
620Enable trinity for DRM
621----------------------
622
623And fix up the fallout. Should be really interesting ...
624
625Level: Advanced
626
627Make KMS tests in i-g-t generic
628-------------------------------
629
630The i915 driver team maintains an extensive testsuite for the i915 DRM driver,
631including tons of testcases for corner-cases in the modesetting API. It would
632be awesome if those tests (at least the ones not relying on Intel-specific GEM
633features) could be made to run on any KMS driver.
634
635Basic work to run i-g-t tests on non-i915 is done, what's now missing is mass-
636converting things over. For modeset tests we also first need a bit of
637infrastructure to use dumb buffers for untiled buffers, to be able to run all
638the non-i915 specific modeset tests.
639
640Level: Advanced
641
642Extend virtual test driver (VKMS)
643---------------------------------
644
645See the documentation of :ref:`VKMS <vkms>` for more details. This is an ideal
646internship task, since it only requires a virtual machine and can be sized to
647fit the available time.
648
649Level: See details
650
651Backlight Refactoring
652---------------------
653
654Backlight drivers have a triple enable/disable state, which is a bit overkill.
655Plan to fix this:
656
6571. Roll out backlight_enable() and backlight_disable() helpers everywhere. This
658   has started already.
6592. In all, only look at one of the three status bits set by the above helpers.
6603. Remove the other two status bits.
661
662Contact: Daniel Vetter
663
664Level: Intermediate
665
666Driver Specific
667===============
668
669AMD DC Display Driver
670---------------------
671
672AMD DC is the display driver for AMD devices starting with Vega. There has been
673a bunch of progress cleaning it up but there's still plenty of work to be done.
674
675See drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/TODO for tasks.
676
677Contact: Harry Wentland, Alex Deucher
678
679vmwgfx: Replace hashtable with Linux' implementation
680----------------------------------------------------
681
682The vmwgfx driver uses its own hashtable implementation. Replace the
683code with Linux' implementation and update the callers. It's mostly a
684refactoring task, but the interfaces are different.
685
686Contact: Zack Rusin, Thomas Zimmermann <tzimmermann@suse.de>
687
688Level: Intermediate
689
690Bootsplash
691==========
692
693There is support in place now for writing internal DRM clients making it
694possible to pick up the bootsplash work that was rejected because it was written
695for fbdev.
696
697- [v6,8/8] drm/client: Hack: Add bootsplash example
698  https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/306579/
699
700- [RFC PATCH v2 00/13] Kernel based bootsplash
701  https://lore.kernel.org/r/20171213194755.3409-1-mstaudt@suse.de
702
703Contact: Sam Ravnborg
704
705Level: Advanced
706
707Outside DRM
708===========
709
710Convert fbdev drivers to DRM
711----------------------------
712
713There are plenty of fbdev drivers for older hardware. Some hardware has
714become obsolete, but some still provides good(-enough) framebuffers. The
715drivers that are still useful should be converted to DRM and afterwards
716removed from fbdev.
717
718Very simple fbdev drivers can best be converted by starting with a new
719DRM driver. Simple KMS helpers and SHMEM should be able to handle any
720existing hardware. The new driver's call-back functions are filled from
721existing fbdev code.
722
723More complex fbdev drivers can be refactored step-by-step into a DRM
724driver with the help of the DRM fbconv helpers. [1] These helpers provide
725the transition layer between the DRM core infrastructure and the fbdev
726driver interface. Create a new DRM driver on top of the fbconv helpers,
727copy over the fbdev driver, and hook it up to the DRM code. Examples for
728several fbdev drivers are available at [1] and a tutorial of this process
729available at [2]. The result is a primitive DRM driver that can run X11
730and Weston.
731
732 - [1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/tzimmermann/linux/tree/fbconv
733 - [2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/tzimmermann/linux/blob/fbconv/drivers/gpu/drm/drm_fbconv_helper.c
734
735Contact: Thomas Zimmermann <tzimmermann@suse.de>
736
737Level: Advanced
738