Re: gpu sharing layer for kernel

From: James Simmons
Date: Tue Feb 06 2007 - 14:41:10 EST



> On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 10:20:18PM +1100, airlied@xxxxxxxx wrote:
> > This patch series contains the gpu sharing layer for kernel that I've
> > mentioned before. It should apply against Linus's git tree.
>
> Yeah!

Finally after all these years!!!! Sorry about the delayed response I was
busy with work.

> > Why do we want this?
> >
> > Currently the kernel cannot provide both the fb and drm drivers with
> > access to the device model and this means the drm cannot get any
> > suspend/resume callbacks. This layer attempts to fix this problem by
> > adding a bus for the gpu drivers to attach to. Currently a lowlevel
> > binding driver is needed along with optional fb and drm components.
>
> If we were to allow this kind of "sharing" for all PCI devices would
> that work out instead? Or would this layer still be needed?

Please do this. Its not only fbdev but backlight and display support.
Note display support is not main stream yet. Greg sent me a email about
the DRM team needing a CRT class as well. That will be a different
discussion. Plus some cards have tuners as well. So this device sharing is
needed. It would also be really nice to prevent driver collisions. For
example vesafb and a fbdev driver controlling the same hardware or acpi
backlight versus the graphics card backlight support.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/