While most devices of the 3 major x86 desktop GPU-providers have GPU and display-controllers merged on a single card, recent development (especially on ARM) shows that rendering (via GPU) and mode-setting (via display-controller) are not necessarily bound to the same device. To better support such devices, several changes are being worked on for DRM.

In it’s current form, the DRM subsystem provides one general-purpose device-node for each registered DRM device: /dev/dri/card<num>. An additional control-node is also created, but it remains unused as of this writing. While in general a kernel driver is allowed to register multiple DRM devices for a single physical device, no driver made use of this, yet. That means, whatever hardware you use, both mode-setting and rendering is done via the same device node. This entails some rather serious consequences:

Access-management to mode-setting and rendering is done via the same file-system node Mode-setting resources of a single card cannot be split among multiple graphics-servers Sharing display-controllers between cards is rather complicated

In the following sections, I want to look closer at each of these points and describe what has been done and what is still planned to overcome these restrictions. This is a highly technical description of the changes and serves as outline for the Linux-Plumbers session on this topic. I expect the reader to be familiar with DRM internals.

1) Render-nodes

While render-nodes have been discussed since 2009 on dri-devel, several mmap-related security-issues have prevented it from being merged. Those have all been fixed and 3-days ago, the basic render-node infrastructure has been merged. While it’s still marked as experimental and hidden behind the drm.rnodes module parameter, I’m confident we will enable it by default in one of the next kernel releases.

What are render-nodes?

From a user-space perspective, render-nodes are “like a big FPU” (krh) that can be used by applications to speed up computations and rendering. They are accessible via /dev/dri/renderD<num> and provide the basic DRM rendering interface. Compared to the old card<num> nodes, they lack some features:

No mode-setting (KMS) ioctls allowed

No insecure gem-flink allowed (use dma-buf instead!)

No DRM-auth required/supported

No legacy pre-KMS DRM-API supported

So whenever an application wants hardware-accelerated rendering, GPGPU access or offscreen-rendering, it no longer needs to ask a graphics-server (via DRI or wl_drm) but can instead open any available render node and start using it. Access-control to render-nodes is done via standard file-system modes. It’s no longer shared with mode-setting resources and thus can be provided for less-privileged applications.

It is important to note that render-nodes do not provide any new APIs. Instead, they just split a subset of the already available DRM-API off to a new device-node. The legacy node is not changed but kept for backwards-compatibility (and, obviously, for mode-setting).

It’s also important to know that render-nodes are not bound to a specific card. While internally it’s created by the same driver as the legacy node, user-space should never assume any connection between a render-node and a legacy/mode-setting node. Instead, if user-space requires hardware-acceleration, it should open any node and use it. For communication back to the graphics-server, dma-buf shall be used. Really! Questions like “how do I find the render-node for a given card?” don’t make any sense. Yes, driver-specific user-space can figure out whether and which render-node was created by which driver, but driver-unspecific user-space should never do that! Depending on your use-cases, either open any render-node you want (maybe allow an environment-variable to select it) or let the graphics-server do that for you and pass the FD via your graphics-API (X11, wayland, …).

So with render-nodes, kernel drivers can now provide an interface only for off-screen rendering and GPGPU work. Devices without any display-controller can avoid any mode-setting nodes and just provide a render-node. User-space, on the other hand, can finally use GPUs without requiring any privileged graphics-server running. They’re independent of the kernel-internal DRM-Master concept!

2) Mode-setting nodes

While splitting off render-nodes from the legacy node simplifies the situation for most applications, we didn’t simplify it for mode-setting applications. Currently, if a graphics-server wants to program a display-controller, it needs to be DRM-Master for the given card. It can acquire it via drmSetMaster() and drop it via drmDropMaster(). But only one application can be DRM-Master at a time. Moreover, only applications with CAP_SYS_ADMIN privileges can acquire DRM-Master. This prevents some quite fancy features:

Running an XServer without root-privileges

Using two different XServers to control two independent monitors/connectors of the same card

The initial idea (and Ilija Hadzic’s follow-up) to support this were mode-setting nodes. A privileged ioctl on the control-node would allow applications to split mode-setting resources across different device-nodes. You could have /dev/dri/modesetD1 and /dev/dri/modesetD2 to split your KMS CRTC and Connector resources. An XServer could use one of these nodes to program the now reduced set of resources. We would have one DRM-Master per node and we’d be fine. We could remove the CAP_SYS_ADMIN restriction and instead rely on file-system access-modes to control access to KMS resources.

Another discussed idea to avoid creating a bunch of file-system nodes, is to allocate these resources on-the-fly. All mode-setting-resources would now be bound to a DRM-Master object. An application can only access the resources available on the DRM-Master that it is assigned to. Initially, all resources are bound to the default DRM-Master as usual, which everyone gets assigned to when opening a legacy node. A new ioctl DRM_CLONE_MASTER is used to create a new DRM-Master with the same resources as the previous DRM-Master of an application. Via a DRM_DROP_MASTER_RESOURCE an application can drop KMS resources from their DRM-Master object. Due to their design, neither requires a CAP_SYS_ADMIN restriction as they only clone or drop privileges, they never acquire new privs! So they can be used by any application with access to the control node to create two new DRM-Master resources and pass them to two independent XServers. These use the passed FD to access the card, instead of opening the legacy or mode-setting nodes.

From the kernel side, the only thing that changes is that we can have multiple active DRM-Master objects. In fact, per DRM-Master one open-file might be allowed KMS access. However, this doesn’t require any driver-modifications (which were mostly “master-agnostic”, anyway) and only a few core DRM changes (except for vmwgfx-ttm-lock..).

3) DRM infrastructure

The previous two chapters focused on user-space APIs, but we also want the kernel-internal infrastructure to account for split hardware. However, fact is we already have anything we need. If some hardware exists without display-controller, you simply omit the DRIVER_MODESET flag and only set DRIVER_RENDER. DRM core will only create a render-node for this device then. If your hardware only provides a display-controller, but no real rendering hardware, you simply set DRIVER_MODESET but omit DRIVER_RENDER (which is what SimpleDRM is doing).

Yes, you currently get a bunch of unused DRM code compiled-in if you don’t use some features. However, this is not because DRM requires it, but only because no-one sent any patches for it, yet! DRM-core is driven by DRM-driver developers!

There is a reason why mid-layers are frowned upon in DRM land. There is no group of core DRM developers, but rather a bunch of driver-authors who write fancy driver-extensions. And once multiple drivers use them, they factor it out and move it to DRM core. So don’t complain about missing DRM features, but rather extend your drivers. If it’s a nice feature, you can count on it being incorporated into DRM-core at some point. It might be you doing most of the work, though!