gfx: the second head shows the boot, not just what comes after it

Two things, both asked for.

**The crash report no longer says which monitors it reached.** "The report is
on the virtio-gpu display too" was a line about the crash screen printed on the
crash screen. The report says what happened and where to read it again; that is
not part of it.

**And the second head now shows the F8 menu and the boot.** It used to be black
until vgpud started several seconds into userspace -- through the splash,
through the menu, through every boot message -- which from the outside is
indistinguishable from a display that does not work. Three stages now cover the
whole boot and hand over to each other without coordinating:

*The loader.* LocateProtocol() answers with the first GOP and offers no way to
ask for the rest, so the rest are found by handle and fed the primary's
framebuffer as a Blt source at the points where a screen is finished: the menu,
the resolution chooser, system information, the splash, each segment of the
kernel load. Blt rather than a second framebuffer to draw into, because a
virtio GOP does not have one -- the same fact that made a virtio-only machine
reboot-loop two commits ago.

*The kernel.* gfx remembers which rows were drawn, as one span rather than a
list of rectangles, because console output is lines and a span is what lines
make. display_mirror_console() copies that span across: a line of boot text is
one cell-row transfer, not a screen. Primed once after pci_init(), because a
display that has just appeared has a black scanout and the console it should be
showing was drawn by the loader into a framebuffer it knows nothing about.

*Then vgpud*, from the same console framebuffer, unchanged.

**Two bugs found building it, both worth the retelling.**

The mirror ran per character from inside vt_feed -- which is inside the console
lock -- and vga_disp_acquire() announces its back buffer with a cprintf. A CPU
taking a lock it already holds, with a call chain that said exactly that. It
runs at the end of consolewrite() and cprintf() now, outside the lock, which is
also the better batching: one transfer per write instead of one per character.

And "is this the console's own screen" was asked of the pointer acquire()
returned. vga_fb hands back a back buffer it copies onto the console's
framebuffer afterwards, so on a one-screen machine the answer was "a different
screen" -- and the console was mirrored onto itself through two megabytes of
intermediate, allocated for the purpose. display_ops grew scanout_phys, which
is a fact about the hardware rather than a policy a driver can get subtly
wrong, and it is asked first: it has no side effects and acquire() has two.

Verified with two heads under QEMU, screendumping the virtio head every 400 ms
from power-on: splash, splash, splash, then the console, and it stays. The F8
menu appears on it; choosing 1024x768 there brings both heads up at 1024x768
byte-identical. A panic still reaches both. Both supported configurations: one
boot each, no traps, no panics, socktest and memfdtest green.

One gap remains and is documented rather than hidden: while the kernel's driver
resets the device during probe, QEMU shows "Display output is not active" for a
fraction of a second. A device being taken over has no scanout until the new
driver sets one.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Nexoniarz 2026-09-22 21:47:35 +02:00
commit 182cc76588
14 changed files with 437 additions and 42 deletions

View file

@ -225,11 +225,22 @@ vga_disp_wait_vblank(struct device *d)
break;
}
// Whatever acquire() handed out, the pixels end up here: the linear
// framebuffer this driver published as the console's scanout. Saying so is
// what keeps the console mirror from copying the console onto itself.
static uint64
vga_disp_scanout_phys(struct device *d)
{
(void)d;
return fb_phys;
}
const struct display_ops vga_display_ops = {
.mode = vga_disp_mode,
.acquire = vga_disp_acquire,
.present = vga_disp_present,
.wait_vblank = vga_disp_wait_vblank,
.scanout_phys = vga_disp_scanout_phys,
};
// Put the VBE framebuffer back on screen.

View file

@ -402,11 +402,24 @@ vgpu_present(struct device *d, int x, int y, int w, int h)
// No wait_vblank. The device presents whole rectangles atomically, so there is
// nothing to synchronise against -- and a null op is more honest than one that
// spins and achieves nothing. display_wait_vblank() handles the absence.
// The guest-side framebuffer, which is this device's own memory and not the
// console's -- on every machine this driver has run on. It is written as a
// comparison rather than as `return 0` because a machine whose *only* display
// is a virtio-gpu would have the console here, and then the honest answer
// changes without this line needing to.
static uint64
vgpu_scanout_phys(struct device *d)
{
struct vgpu *g = vgpu_of(d);
return (g && g->fb) ? dma_phys(g->fb) : 0;
}
const struct display_ops virtio_gpu_display_ops = {
.mode = vgpu_mode,
.acquire = vgpu_acquire,
.present = vgpu_present,
.wait_vblank = 0,
.scanout_phys = vgpu_scanout_phys,
};
// --- probe -----------------------------------------------------------------