Implementation of DRM ioctl Support for NetBSD kernel

This report was prepared by Surya P as a part of Google Summer of Code 2019

What is DRM ioctl ?

Ioctls are input/output control system calls and DRM stands for direct rendering manager The DRM layer provides several services to graphics drivers, many of them driven by the application interfaces it provides through libdrm, the library that wraps most of the DRM ioctls. These include vblank event handling, memory management, output management, framebuffer management, command submission & fencing, suspend/resume support, and DMA services.

Native DRM ioctl calls

NetBSD was able to make native DRM ioctl calls with hardware rendering once xorg and proper mesa packages where installed. We used the glxinfo and glxgears applications to test this out.

DRM ioctl calls from emulation

In order to make sure DRM ioctl calls where also made from the linux emulation layer of NetBSD . We used rpm and suse131 packages In specific base,compat,X11,libdrm,libglx,libexpat packages where used. To my surprise the applications kept segfaulting . I used glxgears and glxinfo rpm packages for this test .when I analyzed the segfault and traced the process , I was able to identify the cause of the segfault which was caused due to broken suse131 libdrm package which did not support nouveau based cards. To further make user that the problem was with the suse packages , I downgraded to suse121 and as expected the glxinfo and glxgears rpm packages ran, but it was using software rendering instead of hardware rendering but nevertheless we were still able to see the DRM ioctl calls made by the emulation layer hence we added some print statements in the kernel source to identify the calls made.

Summary

Fixing the Suse131 package and enabling hardware rendering from emulation is of highest priority , I have also planned to port steam and its dependencies to NetBSD to incorporate some gaming on NetBSD! And finally conversion between 32bit DRM ioctl calls 64bit DRM ioctl calls will be implemented.

Last but not the least I would like to thank my mentor @christos , @maya , @leot for helping me out and guiding me throughout the process and Google for providing me with such a wonderful opportunity to work with NetBSD community.