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Re: IO space memcpy support for userspace.
On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 6:22 AM, David Miller <davem@davemloft.net> wrote:
> From: "Carlos O'Donell" <carlos@systemhalted.org>
> Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2008 12:32:04 -0500
>
>> On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 10:40 PM, Dave Airlie <airlied@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I'm sure this has come up before and I'm sure I'll either wish I never
>> > posted this or someone will show me the crisp corpse of the last guy
>> > who suggested it.
>>
>> Do you plan to prevent the compiler from issuing the same sorts of
>> instructions that might appear in an optimized memcpy?
>>
>> Isn't it dangerous to have memory that doesn't behave like normal
>> memory, and yet try to treat it like normal memory?
>>
>> This mismatch of abstractions is a warning that must not be ignored.
>
> This is basically my opinion as well.
>
> You'll pretty much need to surround accesses to these places with
> accessor macros that do whatever is necessary on a given platform and
> avoids the "dangerous" instructions in cases like IA64.
>
> Treating them like normal memory isn't going to work on all systems.
Its a real pain in the ass with dynamic buffer objects, we don't want userspace
to care where they are located, the kernel migrates them in/out of
video memory, GART, local RAM etc.
However I suspect I just need on these platforms to ban any CPU
accesses to pixmaps in VRAM. However
sw fallbacks to the front buffer will always need these accesses.
Its going to be a real pain getting any traction this stuff upstream
(X.org/Mesa) where the world is x86 and maybe the odd powerpc, having
to do special accessors for shithouse hw is never going to be fun.
Maybe I should start libshithouse to encapsulate the problem, I'll
think about it some more.
Dave.
> BTW, the sunffb xorg driver has special code for "graphics copy"
> which is essentially just a scanline by scanline GCOPY using the
> MMX like stuff sparc64 has. It also is mindful of avoiding access
> patterns that are known to lock up that chip :)
>
> That's just an aside, since sunffb doesn't provide any offscreen
> pixmap memory and thus shouldn't be susceptible to this problem being
> discussed here.
>
>