The Virtual dmabuf or Virtio based dmabuf (Vdmabuf) driver can be used to "transfer" a page-backed dmabuf created in the Guest to the Host without making any copies. A use-case where this driver would be a good fit is a multi-GPU system (perhaps one discrete and one integrated) where one of the GPUs does not have access to the display/connectors/outputs. This could be a embedded system design decision or a restriction made at the firmware/BIOS level. When such a GPU is passthrough'd to a Guest OS, this driver can help in transferring the scanout buffer(s) (rendered using the native rendering stack) to the Host for the purpose of displaying them. The userspace component running in the Guest that transfers the dmabuf is referred to as the producer or exporter and its counterpart running in the Host is referred to as importer or consumer. For instance, a Wayland compositor would potentially be a producer and Qemu UI would be a consumer. It is the producer's responsibility to not reuse or destroy the shared buffer while it is still being used by the consumer. The consumer would send a release cmd indicating that it is done after which the shared buffer can be safely used again by the producer. One way the producer can prevent accidental re-use of the shared buffer is to lock the buffer when it exports it and unlock it after it gets a release cmd. As an example, the GBM API provides a simple way to lock and unlock a surface's buffers. For each dmabuf that is to be shared with the Host, a 128-bit unique ID is generated that identifies this buffer across the whole system. This ID is a combination of the Qemu process ID, a counter and a randomizer. We could potentially use UUID API but we currently use the above mentioned combination to identify the source of the buffer at any given time for bookkeeping. Vivek Kasireddy (3): virtio: Introduce Vdmabuf driver vhost: Add Vdmabuf backend vfio: Share the KVM instance with Vdmabuf drivers/vfio/vfio.c | 9 + drivers/vhost/Kconfig | 9 + drivers/vhost/Makefile | 3 + drivers/vhost/vdmabuf.c | 1332 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ drivers/virtio/Kconfig | 8 + drivers/virtio/Makefile | 1 + drivers/virtio/virtio_vdmabuf.c | 973 +++++++++++++++++++ include/linux/virtio_vdmabuf.h | 271 ++++++ include/uapi/linux/virtio_ids.h | 1 + include/uapi/linux/virtio_vdmabuf.h | 99 ++ 10 files changed, 2706 insertions(+) create mode 100644 drivers/vhost/vdmabuf.c create mode 100644 drivers/virtio/virtio_vdmabuf.c create mode 100644 include/linux/virtio_vdmabuf.h create mode 100644 include/uapi/linux/virtio_vdmabuf.h -- 2.26.2 _______________________________________________ Virtualization mailing list Virtualization@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/virtualization
