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+Motivation:
+
+In complicated DMA pipelines such as graphics (multimedia, camera, gpu, display)
+a consumer of a buffer needs to know when the producer has finished producing
+it. Likewise the producer needs to know when the consumer is finished with the
+buffer so it can reuse it. A particular buffer may be consumed by multiple
+consumers which will retain the buffer for different amounts of time. In
+addition, a consumer may consume multiple buffers atomically.
+The sync framework adds an API which allows synchronization between the
+producers and consumers in a generic way while also allowing platforms which
+have shared hardware synchronization primitives to exploit them.
+
+Goals:
+ * provide a generic API for expressing synchronization dependencies
+ * allow drivers to exploit hardware synchronization between hardware
+ blocks
+ * provide a userspace API that allows a compositor to manage
+ dependencies.
+ * provide rich telemetry data to allow debugging slowdowns and stalls of
+ the graphics pipeline.
+
+Objects:
+ * sync_timeline
+ * sync_pt
+ * sync_fence
+
+sync_timeline:
+
+A sync_timeline is an abstract monotonically increasing counter. In general,
+each driver/hardware block context will have one of these. They can be backed
+by the appropriate hardware or rely on the generic sw_sync implementation.
+Timelines are only ever created through their specific implementations
+(i.e. sw_sync.)
+
+sync_pt:
+
+A sync_pt is an abstract value which marks a point on a sync_timeline. Sync_pts
+have a single timeline parent. They have 3 states: active, signaled, and error.
+They start in active state and transition, once, to either signaled (when the
+timeline counter advances beyond the sync_pt’s value) or error state.
+
+sync_fence:
+
+Sync_fences are the primary primitives used by drivers to coordinate
+synchronization of their buffers. They are a collection of sync_pts which may
+or may not have the same timeline parent. A sync_pt can only exist in one fence
+and the fence's list of sync_pts is immutable once created. Fences can be
+waited on synchronously or asynchronously. Two fences can also be merged to
+create a third fence containing a copy of the two fences’ sync_pts. Fences are
+backed by file descriptors to allow userspace to coordinate the display pipeline
+dependencies.
+
+Use:
+
+A driver implementing sync support should have a work submission function which:
+ * takes a fence argument specifying when to begin work
+ * asynchronously queues that work to kick off when the fence is signaled
+ * returns a fence to indicate when its work will be done.
+ * signals the returned fence once the work is completed.
+
+Consider an imaginary display driver that has the following API:
+/*
+ * assumes buf is ready to be displayed.
+ * blocks until the buffer is on screen.
+ */
+ void display_buffer(struct dma_buf *buf);
+
+The new API will become:
+/*
+ * will display buf when fence is signaled.
+ * returns immediately with a fence that will signal when buf
+ * is no longer displayed.
+ */
+struct sync_fence* display_buffer(struct dma_buf *buf,
+ struct sync_fence *fence);