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

[Mark Zhang]

In technical, it's true to focus xf86-video-modesetting on the hardware
independent stuffs/making frameworks and GPU vendors upstreams their
hardware dependent codes. But this needs a lot of cooperation and the
progress would be slow. This is not GPU vendors want so I assume they'll
not put lots of efforts into it.

So I think it's better to fork the xf86-video-modesetting right now
unless someday most of the GPU vendors are willing to work together and
do contributions to modesetting driver.

Mark
On 11/25/2012 05:09 AM, Thierry Reding wrote:
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> 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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