Re: [Qemu-devel] [RfC PATCH 0/4] make display updates thread safe.

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

On 30/03/17 14:41, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:

>   Hi,
> 
>> Excellent! I can help out with converting and/or testing the SPARC
>> devices (cg3/tcx) if required.
> 
> Sure, test results and patches are very welcome.

I've spent a bit of time over the weekend attempting to convert the
SPARC CG3/TCX framebuffers over to use your new code and pushed the
result to my github branch here:
https://github.com/mcayland/qemu/commits/vga-fixes-sparc.

Feel free to steal/test/borrow as required. The two main things I've
discovered to date are:

1) Problems with asserts() in cpu_physical_memory_snapshot_get_dirty()

Using your current git branch, I get an assert() using VGA under
qemu-system-ppc on startup unless I change the first assert to
"assert(start >= snap->start)".

I'm also not convinced by the second assert "assert(start + length <
snap->end)" either. In the example CG3/TCX conversions I ended up having
to subtract 1 from the size of the region passed to
memory_region_snapshot_get_dirty() in order to avoid it firing when
accessing the last scanline which seems wrong. I didn't explicitly add a
patch to change this to "<=" in my git patchset just in case it broke
further assumptions in the bitmap code relating to the end address.


2) Redraw issues with CG3/TCX after conversion

Despite the conversion from your patches looking reasonably
straightforward, I still see problems with areas of the screen not
updating after conversion. I can easily reproduce these locally as follows:

./qemu-system-sparc -vga cg3 -prom-env 'auto-boot?=false'
./qemu-system-sparc -vga tcx -g 1024x768x8 -prom-env 'auto-boot?=false'
./qemu-system-sparc -vga tcx -g 1024x768x24 -prom-env 'auto-boot?=false'

You can trigger extra screen updates by typing "show-devs" into OpenBIOS
which will cause a lot of screen activity as it writes the device tree
out to the framebuffer. I'm wondering if maybe this is related to the
difference in sizes between DIRTY_MEMORY_BLOCK_SIZE and TARGET_PAGE_BITS
for qemu-system-sparc?

Finally on a slightly unrelated note, the TCX driver still has old code
for 8 and 16 bpp surfaces in QEMU. Am I right in understanding that all
surfaces in QEMU are now 32-bit and the 8/16 bpp code can be removed?


ATB,

Mark.