vga arbiter (news)

[Tiago Vignatti]

Hi,

So we finally have a working code to do the arbitration of the VGA
legacy instructions. The code is separated in three pieces: vgaarb 
module [0], which is the arbiter itself inside Linux; the libvgaaccess 
[1], a set of user space functions to access the arbiter; and 
xf86VGAarbiter [2], the implementation of the library inside Xorg.

Basically we wrapped all the functions of the Xorg which deals with VGA
(those wrapped by the RAC and few others) using the lock/unlock 
functions of the libvgaaccess. Really ugly.

The code was not extensively tested, but we're able to start more than 
one instance of the Xorg at the same time without having the usual 
errors (yay, multiseat!). It's a proof-of-concept. We need to discuss 
and define what would be the best way to integrate the Xorg with the 
libvgaaccess.

There's an urgent todo which is the lack of DRI support. Currently, the
arbitration will probably not work with DRI because it's not guaranteed 
that the registers will keep a sane state in the case of interruptions. 
  The not so urgent todo is to remove the RAC code [3] from inside the Xorg.

As suggested by benh, at this moment we want to stress mainly the kernel
implementation to see if all the requirements were completely achieved, 
so we can post this to lkml for a complete review. So please, comment 
this out. We also started a "Theory of Operation" document here [4].


Thank you,

Tiago Vignatti and Paulo Zanoni


[0] git-clone http://www.inf.ufpr.br/ribas/repos/vga-module.git

[1] git-clone http://www.inf.ufpr.br/ribas/repos/libvgaaccess.git

[2] patch applicable to Xorg 1.4 branch 
(99dd8b9414d1eb7aabc682be0b9cfd7a27eb2a6b):
     http://people.freedesktop.org/~vignatti/xf86VGAArbiter-22Nov.diff

     or git-clone http://www.inf.ufpr.br/ribas/repos/xserver.git

[3] This must be discussed more because RAC lets different OSes be
multi-head wise due all of this is only inside the X server. ITOH, the 
VGA arbiter relies in a piece inside the kernel. So different OSes would
implement different kernel VGA arbiters.

[4] http://people.freedesktop.org/~vignatti/VGA.Notes

-- 
Tiago Vignatti
C3SL - Centro de Computação Científica e Software Livre
www.c3sl.ufpr.br