Render nodes provide an API for userspace to use non-privileged GPU
commands without any running DRM-Master. It is useful for offscreen
rendering, GPGPU clients, and normal render clients which do not perform
modesetting.
Compared to legacy clients, render clients no longer need any
authentication to perform client ioctls. Instead, user-space controls
render/client access to GPUs via filesystem access-modes on the
render-node. Once a render-node was opened, a client has full access to
the client/render operations on the GPU. However, no modesetting or ioctls
that affect global state are allowed on render nodes.
To prevent privilege-escalation, drivers must explicitly state that they
support render nodes. They must mark their render-only ioctls as
DRM_RENDER_ALLOW so render clients can use them. Furthermore, they must
support clients without any attached master.
If filesystem access-modes are not enough for fine-grained access control
to render nodes (very unlikely, considering the versaitlity of FS-ACLs),
you may still fall-back to fd-passing from server to client (which allows
arbitrary access-control). However, note that revoking access is
currently impossible and unlikely to get implemented.
Note: Render clients no longer have any associated DRM-Master as they are
supposed to be independent of any server state. DRM core highly depends on
file_priv->master to be non-NULL for modesetting/ctx/etc. commands.
Therefore, drivers must be very careful to not require DRM-Master if they
support DRIVER_RENDER.
So far render-nodes are protected by "drm_rnodes". As long as this
module-parameter is not set to 1, a driver will not create render nodes.
This allows us to experiment with the API a bit before we stabilize it.
v2: drop insecure GEM_FLINK to force use of dmabuf
Signed-off-by: David Herrmann <dh.herrmann@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Dave Airlie <airlied@redhat.com>
1793126fce