[radeonhd] Necessary for 3D

Matthias Hopf mhopf at suse.de
Fri Oct 5 05:15:16 PDT 2007


On Oct 05, 07 00:22:09 +0200, Syren Baran wrote:
> I personaly dont know how the ATI architecture differs that a kernel
> module might be unnecesarry. Fglrx also uses a kernel module.

It has a completely programmable command processor (Tom's Hardware has a
pretty good overview in this case), and all memory accesses (from the
hardware side) seem to be virtual, so it might have a MMU.
As long as the command processor cannot be programmed from user space,
this scenario can be made secure for complete user space programming.
I have *no* idea ATM, whether this works with the current DRI
architecture or not, so this is probably something for later
improvements, but not for the beginning.

> > Whether Gallium is an option or not is also not decided yet. But that
> > could be changed later on as well. But until some 3D sees the light of
> > the day, it's probably decided by the community.
> 
> I´ll invest a couple of hours now and then. Been a while since i last
> did low level gfx card stuff and 3D, but i hope i´ll be able to
> contribute a bit more than just some pci-ids.

Cool :)
Thanks, but don't follow that road too far ATM. It'll be quite a while
until we will see 3D docs. At least that's my estimation.

CU

Matthias

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