New DRM model

[Jaymz Julian]

On Mon, Feb 09, 2004 at 06:18:31PM -0800, Jon Smirl wrote:
> A more important point is restricting access to the framebuffer. There really,
> really needs to be a global entity controlling the contents of this buffer. 
> It's just going to be impractical when we get 1GB graphics cards to rebuild the
> state of the framebuffer on each VT switch. I'd vote to shut off direct app
> access to it entirely  and require the use of the library to manipulate it. It
> might even be possible to shut direct access down to it completely and do
> everything via the 3D queue.

of course, the people who have 1GB video cards also usually have a couple of
GB of ram, and high end CPU's like athlon64's that make it not as unrealistic
as you paint :).

> EDID from user space turns out to be very simple. I just lifted Luca's I2C code
> out of radeonfb and loaded the I2C eeprom driver. Bingo, my EDID data is sittng
> there for userspace to see. It is also easy to tell what ports have monitors
> attached, they're the ones with EDID data.

Be aware, btw, that some monitors return bogus EDID, so you need to have this be 
be able to be overridden.

> It's a lot of work supporting non-EDID monitors. Are they common enough anymore
> to bother? I retired all of mine about four years ago.

No, but see previous line.

	-jj 

-- 
--
Jaymz Julian aka A Life in Hell / Warriors of the Wasteland / Unreal
Coder, Visionary, Fat Ass.
"Hannibal is a serial killer. He only likes to kill and eat people. 
 Very few people have `I want to be killed and eaten' on their cards, 
 so Hannibal is out of a job." - http://cards.sf.net