[REVIEW] DMX2 DIX merge

[Keith Packard]

On Thu, 07 Jan 2010 10:04:45 -0500, Adam Jackson <ajax at nwnk.net> wrote:

> It doesn't _have_ to work that way, but that's what it looks like DMX2
> does.

Ok, so just something we should work on fixing then.

> If we consider a non-transformative, non-GL compositor, then I think
> it's pretty straightforward.  Pixmaps created relative to the root
> window start life in system memory, and can then be lazily bound
> whichever ScreenRec ends up needing them as a source image.

I'm sure we could come up with magic to try and get the pixmaps to vram
sooner, but guessing wrong means pulling data back from vram. Something
as simple as a per-client hint might be OK though, where you guess that
a pixmap will be used on the same card(s) as a recent window. Lots of
possibilities here, we don't have to solve the problem right away at least.

> Transformation makes this one degree harder; a RWP that fits on GPU 0 in
> the X geometry may be displayed on GPU 1, so now it needs to cross
> memory domains.  Not great.  Do you just evict the pixmap to host memory
> for good when that happens?

I'd like to avoid ever using host memory and instead manage objects that
need to be used on multiple cards by replicating pixmaps, and having
some way to de-replicate at appropriate times. That would avoid needing
to try and make host memory shared across cards...

> GL makes it one degree harder still, because now you have to figure out
> how to implement TFP.  For indirect GLX, the server has to bind the
> pixmap (on some GPU) to potentially any number of DRI textures on
> arbitrary numbers of GPUs.  You can be lazy about it, of course, but if
> you do so you're making the inherent TFP sync problems even worse;
> presumably we want a TFP texture to have the same texels on all the GPUs
> it's used on...

At least with indirect GL it's possible to make it all work with a
suitably large hammer. I don't even know if AIGLX ever worked under
Xinerama though. Did it?

> I'm not even really sure what "direct rendered GLX" means in the context
> of Xinerama.  I can see a plausible definition if all the GPUs are of
> similar enough programming family that they can be driven by the same
> DRI driver logic (all R800, for example), but if you're heterogeneous...
> Direct rendered TFP would still require getting the GEM handle for the
> pixmap to cross DRM device boundaries, even if you're homogeneous.

Yeah, I'd say that we should try to get AIGLX working and then consider
whether we could make homogeneous direct rendering work sometime later.

-- 
keith.packard at intel.com
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