[radeonhd] Necessary for 3D

[Syren Baran]

Am Freitag, den 05.10.2007, 14:15 +0200 schrieb Matthias Hopf:
> 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
Neat.
I thought that idea had died with TIGA
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_Graphics_Architecture )
until i read about NVidia´s CUDA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA ).
>  (Tom's Hardware has a
> pretty good overview in this case),
A link would be nice.
>  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.
A completely programmable GPU changes things a lot.
ATI/AMD should really open their specs on this, this is not only
interresting for a X-driver.
Ever heard of coupling 4 SLI cards in a system without adding a output
connector to any of them?
( http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/91374 , article in german)
Still, the best bang for the buck if single precision computational
power is sufficent.

> > 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.
Now i got a different hunch.
But writing a compiler is nothing i have knowledge of.
> 
> CU
> 
> Matthias
> 
Greets,
Syren