drm/vkms Virtual Kernel Modesetting

vkms is a software-only model of a kms driver that is useful for testing, or for running X (or similar) on headless machines and be able to still use the GPU. vkms aims to enable a virtual display without the need for a hardware display capability.

TODO

CRC API Improvements

  • Optimize CRC computation compute_crc() and plane blending blend()

  • Use the alpha value to blend vaddr_src with vaddr_dst instead of overwriting it in blend().

  • Add igt test to check cleared alpha value for XRGB plane format.

  • Add igt test to check extreme alpha values i.e. fully opaque and fully transparent (intermediate values are affected by hw-specific rounding modes).

Runtime Configuration

We want to be able to reconfigure vkms instance without having to reload the module. Use/Test-cases:

  • Hotplug/hotremove connectors on the fly (to be able to test DP MST handling of compositors).

  • Configure planes/crtcs/connectors (we'd need some code to have more than 1 of them first).

  • Change output configuration: Plug/unplug screens, change EDID, allow changing the refresh rate.

The currently proposed solution is to expose vkms configuration through configfs. All existing module options should be supported through configfs too.

Add Plane Features

There's lots of plane features we could add support for:

  • Real overlay planes, not just cursor.

  • Full alpha blending on all planes.

  • Rotation, scaling.

  • Additional buffer formats, especially YUV formats for video like NV12. Low/high bpp RGB formats would also be interesting.

  • Async updates (currently only possible on cursor plane using the legacy cursor api).

For all of these, we also want to review the igt test coverage and make sure all relevant igt testcases work on vkms.

Writeback support

Currently vkms only computes a CRC for each frame. Once we have additional plane features, we could write back the entire composited frame, and expose it as:

  • Writeback connector. This is useful for testing compositors if you don't have hardware with writeback support.

  • As a v4l device. This is useful for debugging compositors on special vkms configurations, so that developers see what's really going on.

Prime Buffer Sharing

We already have vgem, which is a gem driver for testing rendering, similar to how vkms is for testing the modeset side. Adding buffer sharing support to vkms allows us to test them together, to test synchronization and lots of other features. Also, this allows compositors to test whether they work correctly on SoC chips, where the display and rendering is very often split between 2 drivers.

Output Features

  • Variable refresh rate/freesync support. This probably needs prime buffer sharing support, so that we can use vgem fences to simulate rendering in testing. Also needs support to specify the EDID.

  • Add support for link status, so that compositors can validate their runtime fallbacks when e.g. a Display Port link goes bad.

  • All the hotplug handling describe under "Runtime Configuration".

Atomic Check using eBPF

Atomic drivers have lots of restrictions which are not exposed to userspace in any explicit form through e.g. possible property values. Userspace can only inquiry about these limits through the atomic IOCTL, possibly using the TEST_ONLY flag. Trying to add configurable code for all these limits, to allow compositors to be tested against them, would be rather futile exercise. Instead we could add support for eBPF to validate any kind of atomic state, and implement a library of different restrictions.

This needs a bunch of features (plane compositing, multiple outputs, ...) enabled already to make sense.