Add an entry summarizing the discussion about dealing with brightness control on devices with more then 1 internal panel. The original discussion can be found here: https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/20220517152331.16217-1-hdegoede@xxxxxxxxxx/ Signed-off-by: Hans de Goede <hdegoede@xxxxxxxxxx> --- Documentation/gpu/todo.rst | 68 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 68 insertions(+) diff --git a/Documentation/gpu/todo.rst b/Documentation/gpu/todo.rst index 10bfb50908d1..8548bab88062 100644 --- a/Documentation/gpu/todo.rst +++ b/Documentation/gpu/todo.rst @@ -704,6 +704,74 @@ Contact: Sam Ravnborg Level: Advanced +Brightness handling on devices with multiple internal panels +============================================================ + +On x86/ACPI devices there can be multiple backlight firmware interfaces: +(ACPI) video, vendor specific and others. As well as direct/native (PWM) +register programming by the KMS driver. + +To deal with this backlight drivers used on x86/ACPI call +acpi_video_get_backlight_type() which has heuristics (+quirks) to select +which backlight interface to use; and backlight drivers which do not match +the returned type will not register themselves, so that only one backlight +device gets registered (in a single GPU setup, see below). + +At the moment this more or less assumes that there will only +be 1 (internal) panel on a system. + +On systems with 2 panels this may be a problem, depending on +what interface acpi_video_get_backlight_type() selects: + +1. native: in this case the KMS driver is expected to know which backlight + device belongs to which output so everything should just work. +2. video: this does support controlling multiple backlights, but some work + will need to be done to get the output <-> backlight device mapping + +The above assumes both panels will require the same backlight interface type. +Things will break on systems with multiple panels where the 2 panels need +a different type of control. E.g. one panel needs ACPI video backlight control, +where as the other is using native backlight control. Currently in this case +only one of the 2 required backlight devices will get registered, based on +the acpi_video_get_backlight_type() return value. + +If this (theoretical) case ever shows up, then supporting this will need some +work. A possible solution here would be to pass a device and connector-name +to acpi_video_get_backlight_type() so that it can deal with this. + +Note in a way we already have a case where userspace sees 2 panels, +in dual GPU laptop setups with a mux. On those systems we may see +either 2 native backlight devices; or 2 native backlight devices. + +Userspace already has code to deal with this by detecting if the related +panel is active (iow which way the mux between the GPU and the panels +points) and then uses that backlight device. Userspace here very much +assumes a single panel though. It picks only 1 of the 2 backlight devices +and then only uses that one. + +Note that all userspace code (that I know off) is currently hardcoded +to assume a single panel. + +Before the recent changes to not register multiple (e.g. video + native) +/sys/class/backlight devices for a single panel (on a single GPU laptop), +userspace would see multiple backlight devices all controlling the same +backlight. + +To deal with this userspace had to always picks one preferred device under +/sys/class/backlight and will ignore the others. So to support brightness +control on multiple panels userspace will need to be updated too. + +There are plans to allow brightness control through the KMS API by adding +a "display brightness" property to drm_connector objects for panels. This +solves a number of issues with the /sys/class/backlight API, including not +being able to map a sysfs backlight device to a specific connector. Any +userspace changes to add support for brightness control on devices with +multiple panels really should build on top of this new KMS property. + +Contact: Hans de Goede + +Level: Advanced + Outside DRM =========== -- 2.36.0
