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

[Alex Deucher]

On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 4:09 PM, Thierry Reding
<thierry.reding at avionic-design.de> wrote:
> 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.

Just fork and fill in your own GPU specific bits.  Most accel stuff
ends up being very GPU specific.

Alex