On Tue, Mar 17, 2020 at 11:14 AM Lucas Stach <dev@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Am Dienstag, den 17.03.2020, 10:59 -0700 schrieb Jacob Lifshay: > > I think I found a userspace-accessible way to create sync_files and > > dma_fences that would fulfill the requirements: > > https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/dma-buf/sw_sync.c > > > > I'm just not sure if that's a good interface to use, since it appears > > to be designed only for debugging. Will have to check for additional > > requirements of signalling an error when the process that created the > > fence is killed. > > Something like that can certainly be lifted for general use if it makes > sense. But then with a software renderer I don't really see how fences > help you at all. With a software renderer you know exactly when the > frame is finished and you can just defer pushing it over to the next > pipeline element until that time. You won't gain any parallelism by > using fences as the CPU is busy doing the rendering and will not run > other stuff concurrently, right? There definitely may be other hardware and/or processes that can process some stuff concurrently with the main application, such as the compositor and or video encoding processes (for video capture). Additionally, from what I understand, sync_file is the standard way to export and import explicit synchronization between processes and between drivers on Linux, so it seems like a good idea to support it from an interoperability standpoint even if it turns out that there aren't any scheduling/timing benefits. Jacob
