Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 20 Aug 2007 13:36:46 +0100 | From | "Daniel J Blueman" <> | Subject | Re: uncached page allocator |
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On 20 Aug, 01:50, "Dave Airlie" <airlied@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi all, > > I've started doing some work with using the new DRM memory manager > from TG for pixmaps in the X server using Intel 9xx series hardware. > > The intel hardware pretty much requires pages to be uncached for the > GPU to access them. It can use cached memory for some operations but > it isn't very useful and my attempts to use it ended in a lot of > crashiness..
Write-combining access seems the correct thing here, followed by a wmb(). Uncached writing would be horrendously slow.
[snip] > So after all that I'd like to have some sort of uncached page list I > can allocate pages from
This is exactly what Intel's PAT mechanism exists for - just mark the desired access type (index) on the pages you've been allocated.
It's documented in the Intel Architecture Software Design manuals, but Linux's support is lacking in certain areas [discussions on LKML], which a number of developers have been trying to move forward.
Quite a few significant graphics/HPC etc vendors are forced to use it without this complete support, so it would be good to get this additional impetus involved...
Daniel -- Daniel J Blueman - 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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