=================== Userland interfaces =================== The DRM core exports several interfaces to applications, generally intended to be used through corresponding libdrm wrapper functions. In addition, drivers export device-specific interfaces for use by userspace drivers & device-aware applications through ioctls and sysfs files. External interfaces include: memory mapping, context management, DMA operations, AGP management, vblank control, fence management, memory management, and output management. Cover generic ioctls and sysfs layout here. We only need high-level info, since man pages should cover the rest. libdrm Device Lookup ==================== .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_ioctl.c :doc: getunique and setversion story Primary Nodes, DRM Master and Authentication ============================================ .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_auth.c :doc: master and authentication .. kernel-doc:: drivers/gpu/drm/drm_auth.c :export: .. kernel-doc:: include/drm/drm_auth.h :internal: Render nodes ============ DRM core provides multiple character-devices for user-space to use. Depending on which device is opened, user-space can perform a different set of operations (mainly ioctls). The primary node is always created and called card. Additionally, a currently unused control node, called controlD is also created. The primary node provides all legacy operations and historically was the only interface used by userspace. With KMS, the control node was introduced. However, the planned KMS control interface has never been written and so the control node stays unused to date. With the increased use of offscreen renderers and GPGPU applications, clients no longer require running compositors or graphics servers to make use of a GPU. But the DRM API required unprivileged clients to authenticate to a DRM-Master prior to getting GPU access. To avoid this step and to grant clients GPU access without authenticating, render nodes were introduced. Render nodes solely serve render clients, that is, no modesetting or privileged ioctls can be issued on render nodes. Only non-global rendering commands are allowed. If a driver supports render nodes, it must advertise it via the DRIVER_RENDER DRM driver capability. If not supported, the primary node must be used for render clients together with the legacy drmAuth authentication procedure. If a driver advertises render node support, DRM core will create a separate render node called renderD. There will be one render node per device. No ioctls except PRIME-related ioctls will be allowed on this node. Especially GEM_OPEN will be explicitly prohibited. Render nodes are designed to avoid the buffer-leaks, which occur if clients guess the flink names or mmap offsets on the legacy interface. Additionally to this basic interface, drivers must mark their driver-dependent render-only ioctls as DRM_RENDER_ALLOW so render clients can use them. Driver authors must be careful not to allow any privileged ioctls on render nodes. With render nodes, user-space can now control access to the render node via basic file-system access-modes. A running graphics server which authenticates clients on the privileged primary/legacy node is no longer required. Instead, a client can open the render node and is immediately granted GPU access. Communication between clients (or servers) is done via PRIME. FLINK from render node to legacy node is not supported. New clients must not use the insecure FLINK interface. Besides dropping all modeset/global ioctls, render nodes also drop the DRM-Master concept. There is no reason to associate render clients with a DRM-Master as they are independent of any graphics server. Besides, they must work without any running master, anyway. Drivers must be able to run without a master object if they support render nodes. If, on the other hand, a driver requires shared state between clients which is visible to user-space and accessible beyond open-file boundaries, they cannot support render nodes. VBlank event handling ===================== The DRM core exposes two vertical blank related ioctls: DRM_IOCTL_WAIT_VBLANK This takes a struct drm_wait_vblank structure as its argument, and it is used to block or request a signal when a specified vblank event occurs. DRM_IOCTL_MODESET_CTL This was only used for user-mode-settind drivers around modesetting changes to allow the kernel to update the vblank interrupt after mode setting, since on many devices the vertical blank counter is reset to 0 at some point during modeset. Modern drivers should not call this any more since with kernel mode setting it is a no-op. This second part of the GPU Driver Developer's Guide documents driver code, implementation details and also all the driver-specific userspace interfaces. Especially since all hardware-acceleration interfaces to userspace are driver specific for efficiency and other reasons these interfaces can be rather substantial. Hence every driver has its own chapter.