SMI 501 local bus driver

Paulo Cesar Pereira de Andrade pcpa at mandriva.com.br
Thu Sep 25 13:53:07 PDT 2008


Christian Pössinger wrote:
> On Thu, 25.09.2008, 16:23, Alex Deucher wrote:
>> Paulo Cesar Pereira de Andrade is doing the work on the siliconmotion
>> driver at the moment.  He may know more about local bus issues.  FWIW,
>> the kernel sm501 FB driver supports both pci and local bus
>> configurations as well as both outputs.  So if worse comes to worst,
>> you could use the fbdev ddx on top of that (assuming you are using
>> Linux).
>>
>> Alex
>
> The main reason why I want to port the driver is that I need the hardware
> acceleration. The fb only provides me with 11fps but I need at least
> 30fps.
>
> Christian

  I am not an expert on SMI501, just worked on it, not full time,
for a bit more then one month now... I am working on it for an
alternate driver for http://www.gdium.com/

  The kernel module I have, at least would probably need a few
tweaks, like enabling pci burst/retry, as I guess you need
fps for video play, and that is the major performance boost
I noticed, but there should be other optimizations, maybe
reprogramming the clocks, to get maximal output speed, or
playing with the other programmable system options.

  You can check the driver in git master. It is a work in
progress. But, if possible, after making it have sane
modesetting code, hopefully using randr1.2, I hope to
add more complete exa support... The specs says it supports
accelerated alpha, scaling, rotation, etc...

Paulo




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