GPU VA Manager To Land In Linux 6.6

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GPU VA Manager To Land In Linux 6.6

The DRM subsystem is slated to pickup a GPU Virtual Address "VA" Manager with the Linux 6.6 kernel that is motivated by work around Vulkan sparse memory binding requirements...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.6-GPU-VA-Manager

[GraysonPeddie]

So that image for showing a comment (/* ... */) in the article failed two WCAG standards:

• WCAG 2.0 SC 1.1.1 A Non-Text Content
• WCAG 2.0 SC 1.4.5 AA Images of Text

I would love to transcribe it for users who use screen readers, but that's a whole lot to write a multi-line comment.

[tildearrow]

Wait there is typo:

This pull also adds the DRM_IOCTL_SYNCOBJ_EVENTFD that is used ot register an eventfd that is useful such as for Wayland compositors to handle wait-before-submit events.

[QwertyChouskie]

This is the first bit of https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/[email protected]/ to land. Once it all lands, from my understanding there should be nothing major preventing NVK from being merged to mainline Mesa. Exciting times!

[OneTimeShot]

I am a little confused.... shouldn't the Mesa code be written at the time that the Vulkan standard is in development (even before hardware is designed)? Why the massive delay between Nvidia/AMD designing stuff, and code appearing in Mesa?

[toughy]

This is the first bit of https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/[email protected]/ to land. Once it all lands, from my understanding there should be nothing major preventing NVK from being merged to mainline Mesa. Exciting times!

So what is the next bit ?

[QwertyChouskie]

I am a little confused.... shouldn't the Mesa code be written at the time that the Vulkan standard is in development (even before hardware is designed)?

You can't write code to control hardware if that hardware doesn't exist.

Why the massive delay between Nvidia/AMD designing stuff, and code appearing in Mesa?

For Nvidia, there was little incentive to develop an open Vulkan driver if there was never going to be a way to run the card at anything but the extremely low boot clocks. Now that reclocking is possible, there's much more reason to put in the effort.

For AMD, they usually have day 1 support for new cards nowadays.

[QwertyChouskie]

So what is the next bit ?

All the other patches in that link.

[WiR3D]

That patch from Simon Ser is the first part of explicit sync for wayland. Which was the whole argument with nvidia where they didn't want to implement implicit sync. So this removes a blocker so that wayland can start functioning with explicit sync and start moving linux to an explicit world (like all the other major oses.