Re: [Intel-gfx] [PATCH] drm: Add support for integrated privacy screens

[Daniel Stone]

Hi Thierry,

On Fri, 25 Oct 2019 at 12:36, Thierry Reding <thierry.reding@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 24, 2019 at 01:45:16PM -0700, Rajat Jain wrote:
> > I did think about having a state variable in software to get and set
> > this. However, I think it is not very far fetched that some platforms
> > may have "hardware kill" switches that allow hardware to switch
> > privacy-screen on and off directly, in addition to the software
> > control that we are implementing. Privacy is a touchy subject in
> > enterprise, and anything that reduces the possibility of having any
> > inconsistency between software state and hardware state is desirable.
> > So in this case, I chose to not have a state in software about this -
> > we just report the hardware state everytime we are asked for it.
>
> So this doesn't really work with atomic KMS, then. The main idea behind
> atomic KMS is that you apply a configuration either completely or not at
> all. So at least for setting this property you'd have to go through the
> state object.
>
> Now, for reading out the property you might be able to get away with the
> above. I'm not sure if that's enough to keep the state up-to-date,
> though. Is there some way for a kill switch to trigger an interrupt or
> other event of some sort so that the state could be kept up-to-date?
>
> Daniel (or anyone else), do you know of any precedent for state that
> might get modified behind the atomic helpers' back? Seems to me like we
> need to find some point where we can actually read back the current
> "hardware value" of this privacy screen property and store that back
> into the state.

Well, apart from connector state, though that isn't really a property
as such, there's the link_state property, which is explicitly designed
to do just that. That has been quite carefully designed for the
back-and-forth though.

Cheers,
Daniel