[Xorg-driver-geode] Supporting development of geode driver

[Huang, FrankR]

Christian,
	Actually I am now working on the graphics driver stuff, but not for linux.
	One point is that in community, there are a lot people still working on Geode, I think Martin still work on geode, right?
	Another point is that you persuade AMD managers go on working on Geode:)

Thanks,
Frank

> -----Original Message-----
> From: xorg-driver-geode-bounces+frankr.huang=amd.com at lists.x.org
> [mailto:xorg-driver-geode-bounces+frankr.huang=amd.com at lists.x.org] On
> Behalf Of Christian Gmeiner
> Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 4:55 PM
> To: xorg-driver-geode at lists.x.org
> Cc: Huang, FrankR
> Subject: [Xorg-driver-geode] Supporting development of geode driver
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> the company I am employed wants to support the further development of
> the geode driver.
> At the moment we are discusing this internaly how we could do this.
> Sure the best way would
> be to provide patches that gets included in next releases of the driver, but
> our knowledge in x11 driver development and the geode video hardware is
> quite limited and there is also a lack of man power. So we think the best way
> would be to sponsor some money so that a more suitable developer could
> work for full time as a freelancer on the driver.
> I am not sure how this developer could be at the moment.
> 
> As far as I can tell only one thing should be improved - the overall
> performance of the driver.
> 
> --- Get rid of ping-pong pixmaps ---
> 
> "All these fallbacks would also be less costly, if we didn't end up migrating the
> pixmaps out temporarily from video memory to system memory. I believe
> that theoretically pixman based software fallbacks could be done inside
> video memory, but I didn't get EXA classic mode convinced of that yet to try it
> out. As in, video memory is really just CPU memory too, just framebuffer
> memory set aside into which hardware accelerated operations can put their
> result in; so if we were doing software operations in there as well if there's
> enough room, without migrating out of there, we could avoid the costly part
> of copying memory around too much and fix it for all cases to not be SO big of
> a performance hit, while it'd be still nice to do in hardware what is possible."
> [1]
> 
> "All these fallbacks would also be less costly, if we didn't end up migrating the
> pixmaps out temporarily from video memory to system memory. I believe
> that theoretically pixman based software fallbacks could be done inside
> video memory, but I didn't get EXA classic mode convinced of that yet to try it
> out. As in, video memory is really just CPU memory too, just framebuffer
> memory set aside into which hardware accelerated operations can put their
> result in; so if we were doing software operations in there as well if there's
> enough room, without migrating out of there, we could avoid the costly part
> of copying memory around too much and fix it for all cases to not be SO big of
> a performance hit, while it'd be still nice to do in hardware what is possible."
> [2]
> 
> 
> I can not tell how much time this takes to implement it, but maybe Martin
> can give some assessment.
> 
> What do you think about it? I am sorry that I do not write this mail from my
> company mail address but gmail has the better spam filter :)
> 
> 
> [1] http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-driver-geode/2011-April/001209.html
> [2] http://www.mail-archive.com/xorg-driver-
> geode at lists.x.org/msg00971.html
> 
> --
> Christian Gmeiner, MSc
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