xf86-video-tegra or xf86-video-modesetting?

Thierry Reding thierry.reding at avionic-design.de
Sat Nov 24 13:09:17 PST 2012


Hi,

With tegra-drm going into Linux 3.8 and NVIDIA posting initial patches
for 2D acceleration on top of it, I've been looking at the various ways
how this can best be leveraged.

The most obvious choice would be to start work on an xf86-video-tegra
driver that uses the code currently in the works to implement the EXA
callbacks that allow some of the rendering to be offloaded to the GPU.
The way I would go about this is to fork xf86-video-modesetting, do some
rebranding and add the various bits required to offload rendering.

However, that has all the usual drawbacks of a fork so I thought maybe
it would be better to write some code to xf86-video-modesetting to add
GPU-specific acceleration on top. Such code could be leveraged by other
drivers as well and all of them could share a common base for the
functionality provided through the standard DRM IOCTLs.

That approach has some disadvantages of its own, like the potential
bloat if many GPUs do the same. It would also be a bit of a step back
to the old monolithic days of X.

So what do other people think?

Thierry
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