Re: [PATCH v4 12/17] drm/uAPI: Add "preferred color format" drm property as setting for userspace

From: Simon Ser <contact@emersion.fr>
To: Pekka Paalanen <ppaalanen@gmail.com>
Cc: Werner Sembach <wse@tuxedocomputers.com>,
	amd-gfx@lists.freedesktop.org, tzimmermann@suse.de,
	intel-gfx@lists.freedesktop.org, sunpeng.li@amd.com,
	dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
	airlied@linux.ie, rodrigo.vivi@intel.com,
	alexander.deucher@amd.com, christian.koenig@amd.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH v4 12/17] drm/uAPI: Add "preferred color format" drm property as setting for userspace
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2021 08:12:54 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <jIDQ2rRRMWlhDDPf08Z8xZlEE8HTBx7fHsylFdK0joSSFVyES8D444Giyiji9zbIm7dU4QpbsXZLvIDTbGW0wEoUWKsMEI4evizn0UdGMvM=@emersion.fr> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20210622101516.6a53831c@eldfell>

On Tuesday, June 22nd, 2021 at 09:15, Pekka Paalanen <ppaalanen@gmail.com> wrote:

> yes, I think this makes sense, even if it is a property that one can't
> tell for sure what it does before hand.
>
> Using a pair of properties, preference and active, to ask for something
> and then check what actually worked is good for reducing the
> combinatorial explosion caused by needing to "atomic TEST_ONLY commit"
> test different KMS configurations. Userspace has a better chance of
> finding a configuration that is possible.
>
> OTOH, this has the problem than in UI one cannot tell the user in
> advance which options are truly possible. Given that KMS properties are
> rarely completely independent, and in this case known to depend on
> several other KMS properties, I think it is good enough to know after
> the fact.
>
> If a driver does not use what userspace prefers, there is no way to
> understand why, or what else to change to make it happen. That problem
> exists anyway, because TEST_ONLY commits do not give useful feedback
> but only a yes/no.

By submitting incremental atomic reqs with TEST_ONLY (i.e. only changing one
property at a time), user-space can discover which property makes the atomic
commit fail.

I'm not a fan of this "preference" property approach. The only way to find out
whether it's possible to change the color format is to perform a user-visible
change (with a regular atomic commit) and check whether it worked
after-the-fact. This is unlike all other existing KMS properties.

I'd much rather see a more general approach to fix this combinatorial explosion
than to add special-cases like this.