Yes but you dont have to go back to user space each time you fill the hardware
queue.
> possibly millions of accelerated operations per second. Smallish
> accelerated operations finish within 10-100 cycles, this is why almost no
> GX card has IRQ-driven acceleration, they have an engine status/depth
> register that can be polled. If you let users access the framebuffer as
> well then 'delayed syncing' (a technique in XFree86 XAA that has almost
> doubled acceleration performance ...) can not be done safely.
Now that depends on two things
1. If you only allow one user to have the frame buffer a time and keep
context on switches.
2. If you dont pull MMU stunts to fault/block other tasks touching
the memory during such events. Also note most operations take so
few cycles a non scheduling spin is no big deal (SMP needs the mmu
stunt always alas).
Alan
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