• Helge Deller's avatar
    Revert "fbdev: Garbage collect fbdev scrolling acceleration, part 1 (from TODO list)" · 1148836f
    Helge Deller authored
    This reverts commit b3ec8cdf.
    
    Revert the second (of 2) commits which disabled scrolling acceleration
    in fbcon/fbdev.  It introduced a regression for fbdev-supported graphic
    cards because of the performance penalty by doing screen scrolling by
    software instead of using the existing graphic card 2D hardware
    acceleration.
    
    Console scrolling acceleration was disabled by dropping code which
    checked at runtime the driver hardware capabilities for the
    BINFO_HWACCEL_COPYAREA or FBINFO_HWACCEL_FILLRECT flags and if set, it
    enabled scrollmode SCROLL_MOVE which uses hardware acceleration to move
    screen contents.  After dropping those checks scrollmode was hard-wired
    to SCROLL_REDRAW instead, which forces all graphic cards to redraw every
    character at the new screen position when scrolling.
    
    This change effectively disabled all hardware-based scrolling acceleration for
    ALL drivers, because now all kind of 2D hardware acceleration (bitblt,
    fillrect) in the drivers isn't used any longer.
    
    The original commit message mentions that only 3 DRM drivers (nouveau, omapdrm
    and gma500) used hardware acceleration in the past and thus code for checking
    and using scrolling acceleration is obsolete.
    
    This statement is NOT TRUE, because beside the DRM drivers there are around 35
    other fbdev drivers which depend on fbdev/fbcon and still provide hardware
    acceleration for fbdev/fbcon.
    
    The original commit message also states that syzbot found lots of bugs in fbcon
    and thus it's "often the solution to just delete code and remove features".
    This is true, and the bugs - which actually affected all users of fbcon,
    including DRM - were fixed, or code was dropped like e.g. the support for
    software scrollback in vgacon (commit 973c096f).
    
    So to further analyze which bugs were found by syzbot, I've looked through all
    patches in drivers/video which were tagged with syzbot or syzkaller back to
    year 2005. The vast majority fixed the reported issues on a higher level, e.g.
    when screen is to be resized, or when font size is to be changed. The few ones
    which touched driver code fixed a real driver bug, e.g. by adding a check.
    
    But NONE of those patches touched code of either the SCROLL_MOVE or the
    SCROLL_REDRAW case.
    
    That means, there was no real reason why SCROLL_MOVE had to be ripped-out and
    just SCROLL_REDRAW had to be used instead. The only reason I can imagine so far
    was that SCROLL_MOVE wasn't used by DRM and as such it was assumed that it
    could go away. That argument completely missed the fact that SCROLL_MOVE is
    still heavily used by fbdev (non-DRM) drivers.
    
    Some people mention that using memcpy() instead of the hardware acceleration is
    pretty much the same speed. But that's not true, at least not for older graphic
    cards and machines where we see speed decreases by factor 10 and more and thus
    this change leads to console responsiveness way worse than before.
    
    That's why the original commit is to be reverted. By reverting we
    reintroduce hardware-based scrolling acceleration and fix the
    performance regression for fbdev drivers.
    
    There isn't any impact on DRM when reverting those patches.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarHelge Deller <deller@gmx.de>
    Acked-by: default avatarGeert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>
    Acked-by: default avatarSven Schnelle <svens@stackframe.org>
    Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # v5.16+
    Signed-off-by: default avatarHelge Deller <deller@gmx.de>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDaniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch>
    Link: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/msgid/20220202135531.92183-2-deller@gmx.de
    1148836f
fbcon.h 7.07 KB