Hi everyone, I would like to bring to the attention of dri-devel and linux-fbdev community a set of hopefully useful and interesting patches that I (and a few other colleagues) have been working on during the past few months. Here, I will provide a short abstract, so that you can decide whether this is of interest for you. At the end, I will provide the pointers to the code and documentation. The code is based on Dave Arilie's tree, drm-next branch and it allows a GPU driver to have an arbitrary number of CRTCs (configurable by user) instead of only those CRTCs that represent real hardware. The new CRTCs, that we call Virtual CRTCs can be attached to a foreign device, that we call CTD device (short for Compression Transmission and Display), and pixels can be streamed out of the GPU to the device. In one example, we use AMD/ATI Radeon GPU to do 3D rendering (accelerated, of course) and we use our code to add additional monitor heads using DisplayLink devices. In other words, we achieve accelerated 3D rendering on a DisplayLink monitor. In another example we funnel rendered pixels to userland by emulating a Video-for-Linux device (and then userland can do whatever it wants with it). While doing all this, GPU has no idea that we are doing this, the entire DRI "thinks" that it is just dealing with a GPU that has a few "extra" connectors and CRTCs. So everything ports without the need to modify anything in the userland. In general any device that can do something good with rendered pixels can act as a CTD device, allowing a GPU to be an acceleration device for a less capable display device or (the opposite) a frame-buffer-based display device to be an expansion card for a GPU. Of course, for each display device, a driver would have to be made compatible with our new infrastructure (which is what we have done with DisplayLink driver and also wrote one "synthetic" driver to fake out a V4L2 device as a CTD device). The newly introduced kernel module that we call VCRTCM (short for Virtual CRTC Manager) handles the "traffic" between GPUs (actually their CRTCs) and CTDs. The code makes use of DMA wherever possible and also deals with specifics of CRTCs like modes, vblanks, page flips, hardware cursor, etc. (just for kick, we played OpenArena and watched Unigine Heaven demo on a DisplayLink monitor). At this time, we would like to solicit feedback, comments, and possibly contributions. The code is on github (pointers below) and is based on the current state of drm-next branch from Dave's tree. The code is very experimental, but complete and stable enough that you can do something useful with it. We will be adding more CTD drivers and updates to current ones in the near future and will continue to maintain the code on github. If the community finds this useful, we would be glad to work with the maintainers on merging this upstream. So we would especially like to hear what you would like to see changed to make this code acceptable for the mainline of development. My Github page is at https://github.com/ihadzic. To access the kernel code type: $ git clone git://github.com/ihadzic/linux-vcrtcm.git $ git branch drm-next-vcrtcm origin/drm-next-vcrtcm $ git checkout drm-next-vcrtcm You will get all that's currently on Dave's drm-next plus our patches on the top. We kept the development history preserved without squashing patches (unless we had to due to merge/rebase conflicts), so you can see (and laugh at) all our goofs and fixes to them. To access the documentation, type: $ git clone git://github.com/ihadzic/vcrtcm-doc.git Then read the HOWTO.txt file. The first few sections provide some general overview, and the sections that come later provide instructions how to use our stuff. Again, all comments, positive or negative, are very welcome. -- Ilija _______________________________________________ dri-devel mailing list dri-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel
