EXA support for nv driver

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt]

On Tue, 2005-09-06 at 09:29 +0200, Lars Knoll wrote:
> > You mean PCIe chipsets? ;) AFAIK AGP is explicitly specified not to be
> > cache coherent.
> 
> AGP 3.0 seems to allow for cache coherency:

Yah, but any idea which chipsets actually provide it ? I've been
thinking about various ways of "using" those features lately with EXA.
There have been several things I had in mind.

1) Create a 3rd classs of migration for pixmaps -> AGP memory (or
whatever "GART" memory, wether it's AGP, PCI-GART or PCI-E GART).
Pixmaps put there are the ones that get regulary banged from both the
CPU (software fallbacks) and the engine. The nice thing with AGP memory
is that it's faster than video memory for CPU accesses (especially if
your chipset supports cacheable AGP !) and it's directly accessible by
the engine.

The way to do that at first (incremental implementation) would probably
to modify the offscreen allocator to actually have N instances of the
allocator itself (zones). Then, the driver could create a memory zone
and an AGP zone. The pixmaps themselves would have a flag indicating in
which zone their backup is. That also means more dynamic allocation of
the vram/agp storage as we don't want to permanently allocate space in
both for all pixmaps, and thus more causes for failures due to
fragmentation but since we can kick pixmaps around, and possibly move
them around as well, that should be doable...

2) With PCI GART and PCI-E GART (and with cache coherent AGP too) we are
in a new situation where we don't really need to permanently bind a
whole aperture in the "GART" space at all. We could dynamically map the
pixmap there "on demand". Which mean that instead of migrating the
pixmaps to "AGP" (or rather call it GART space)

This is really only a low level implementation detail compared to 1).
That is, we still have to allocate GART virtual space (though we can
afford to have a much larger GART) and instead of "migrating" from
memory to GART, we would just alter the mappings. Sort-of a faster
version of 1).

Keith, what do you think ?

Ben.