Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2017 17:17:28 -0300
From: Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@osg.samsung.com>
To: Gustavo Padovan <gustavo@padovan.org>
Cc: linux-media@vger.kernel.org, Hans Verkuil <hverkuil@xs4all.nl>,
        Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>,
        Javier Martinez Canillas <javier@osg.samsung.com>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        Gustavo Padovan <gustavo.padovan@collabora.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC 00/10] V4L2 explicit synchronization support
Message-ID: <20170608171728.09d3b194@vento.lan>
In-Reply-To: <20170525003101.GA16058@jade>
References: <20170313192035.29859-1-gustavo@padovan.org>
        <20170525003101.GA16058@jade>
Organization: Samsung
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Hi Gustavo,

Em Wed, 24 May 2017 21:31:01 -0300
Gustavo Padovan <gustavo@padovan.org> escreveu:

> Hi all,
> 
> I've been working on the v2 of this series, but I think I hit a blocker
> when trying to cover the case where the driver asks to requeue the
> buffer. It is related to the out-fence side.
> 
> In the current implementation we return on QBUF an out-fence fd that is not
> tied to any buffer, because we don't know the queueing order until the
> buffer is queued to the driver. Then when the buffer is queued we use
> the BUF_QUEUED event to notify userspace of the index of the buffer,
> so now userspace knows the buffer associated to the out-fence fd
> received earlier.
> 
> Userspace goes ahead and send a DRM Atomic Request to the kernel to
> display that buffer on the screen once the fence signals. If it is 
> a nonblocking request the fence waiting is past the check phase, thus
> it isn't allowed to fail anymore.
> 
> But now, what happens if the V4L2 driver calls buffer_done() asking
> to requeue the buffer. That means the operation failed and can't
> signal the fence, starving the DRM side.
> 
> We need to fix that. The only way I can see is to guarantee ordering of
> buffers when out-fences are used. Ordering is something that HAL3 needs
> to so maybe there is more than one reason to do it like this. I'm not
> a V4L2 expert, so I don't know all the consequences of such a change.
> 
> Any other ideas?
> 
> The current patchset is at:
> 
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/padovan/linux.git/log/?h=v4l2-fences

Currently, nothing warrants that buffers will be returned in order,
but that should be the case of most drivers. I guess the main
exception would be mem2mem codec drivers. On those, the driver
or the hardware may opt to reorder the buffers.

If this is a mandatory requirement for explicit fences to work, then
we'll need to be able to explicitly enable it, per driver, and
clearly document that drivers using it *should* warrant that the
dequeued buffer will follow the queued order.

We may need to modify VB2 in order to enforce it or return an
error if the order doesn't match.

-- 
Thanks,
Mauro