[Mesa-dev] Nouveau driver problem when using EGL_LINUX_DMA_BUF_EXT

[Ilia Mirkin]

On Mon, Apr 9, 2018 at 6:57 AM, Volker Vogelhuber
<v.vogelhuber at digitalendoscopy.de> wrote:
> Thanks for the response. I'm a bit confused. What is the difference between
> a PRIME handle and a generic DMABUF file descriptor? I'm importing a buffer
> from V4L2 into an Nvidia context. So the FD is backed by the V4L2's
> vb2_queue used in the UVC driver which provides the FD by using the
> VIDIOC_EXPBUF ioctl. I doubt that there is a GEM object associated with it
> at all, as V4L2 is probably not aware of GEM, is it?

Right, there probably isn't. I'm also not 100% sure it's required,
just seemed like it may be based on a quick glance at the code.

>
> I would have guessed, that the use case would be quite common, as having a
> Live video source rendered via OpenGL shouldn't be a very special topic and
> having a zero copy approach should be better than having to copy the data

Having a live video source is a pretty special topic. (Esp having one
that you ever use.)

> all the time. Would allocating a buffer in the GPU and exporting it via
> eglCreateDRMImageMESA an option. Then I would have to import that buffer
> into V4L2 via V4L2_MEMORY_DMABUF. But as eglCreateDRMImageMESA only accepts
> EGL_DRM_BUFFER_FORMAT_ARGB32_MESA it's not very flexible regarding V4L2
> input formats. Apart from that, I think those buffers use GPU specific
> tiling/swizzling, so V4L2 won't be able to properly write data into it. So
> having the GPU importing the buffer from V4L2 seems to be more straight
> forward to me and as the i915 is able to do exactly this, and the
> code/interfaces are the same for nouveau I wouldn't expect the nouveau
> driver to behave differently.

Well, clearly it does. I'm not particularly surprised, since, like I
said, it seems likely that you're the first to attempt it (or at least
inquire as to its failure after attempting it). If you're interested
in debugging this, I'd recommend joining #nouveau on irc.freenode.net.
Otherwise, focus on hardware whose makers invest in open-source GL
drivers -- i.e. not NVIDIA.

  -ilia