Re: useful ram on voodoo(2) cards?

Philipp Rumpf (prumpf@jcsbs.lanobis.de)
Mon, 14 Dec 1998 17:06:09 +0100

On Mon, Dec 14, 1998 at 01:04:41PM +0000, John Berthels wrote:
> a) is the 8/12Mb of ram on a voodoo/voodoo2 card read/write-able? [I'd
> guess it should be writeable, given the card's function - but is it
> readable?]
>
> b) If the answer to a) is 'yes'. Would it be possible to write a driver
> which provided a /dev/voodooram file and permitted people to do:
>
> mkswap /dev/voodooram
> swapon /dev/voodooram

The GGI project had such plans IIRC. I do not know how much worse the quality
of the RAM on graphic cards is when compared to normal RAM. Anybody interested
in patching memtest86 to test video memory, too ?

> And a subsidary question: given a), is this idea insufficiently ambitious
> and could/should such RAM be usable as real system memory, not just fast
> swap?

Should be possible. Nevertheless the memory on graphic cards is usually
slower so it could be bad to use it like normal RAM.

Philipp Rumpf

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/