Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 11 Sep 2004 13:54:34 -0400 | From | Jon Smirl <> | Subject | Re: radeon-pre-2 |
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On Sat, 11 Sep 2004 10:02:57 -0700 (PDT), Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> wrote: > Jon, you want to get to that "Final step is to integrate the chip specific > code from DRM and fbdev". Alan doesn't even want to get there. I think > Alan just wants some simple infrastructure to let everybody play together.
This is the core problem. I want to get to a point where there is a single, integrated piece of code controlling the complex functions of the 3D hardware.
I want to get away from the model of "I just got control of the chip, who knows what the state of it is, I better reset everything". I also want to get away from "now I want to use this register, i need to inspect every over driver and piece of user space code to make sure they don't stomp it". Or "I didn't even know your code existed, sorry about stomping that critical register and causing 100 bug reports". Or "why don't we just split the VRAM in half so we don't have to share memory management". Or suspend code that restores 2D mode and ignores 3D.
The problem with everyone playing together in separate code bases assumes that everyone knows what everyone else is doing and that's never the case. A single card specific code base collects everything to a single place where it can be monitored.
A good example of this is switching the GPU between 2D and 3D mode on every process swap.
In general the current X design only has a single 3D client. With a composited display and pbuffer background drawing we are going to have one 3D client for every top level window. This is going to require complicated code to smoothly multitask the 3D drawing streams. The last thing we need is something in the middle of this switching the chip in and out of 2D mode.
-- Jon Smirl jonsmirl@gmail.com - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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