[Intel-gfx] GMA HD driver support for hardware acceleration

[Chris Wilson]

On Tue, 01 Feb 2011 15:45:34 +0530, sudeep <sudeeprk at tataelxsi.co.in> wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I am a starter in Linux graphics. Our development board is 
> *MATXM*-*CORE*-*411*-*B* from Emerson. It has
> Intel i5 core and QM57 chip set. We have a a requirement to use the 
> hardware acceleration for various graphics
> operations such as blit, blend etc.
> 1)Does the Linux graphics driver for GMA-HD(in our understanding, i915) 
> support hardware acceleration for
> blit/blend operations?

Yes. Though the BLT engine (the blitter) can not do alpha blend nor
scaling, it is a pure bitblt. To do alpha blending and other "advance"
blits, you need to use the 3D pipeline (as on all previous genX).
Ideally you would use GL.

> 2)How to test and verify the hardware acceleration for blit/blend 
> operations  in GMA-HD platform

The hardware contains a couple of register to show GPU activity. These are
exposed in intel-gpu-tools/tool/intel_gpu_top, which shows how busy the
GPU is. Assuming that tracing the actual emission of GPU commands doesn't
convince you that the operations are being performed on the GPU.
-Chris

-- 
Chris Wilson, Intel Open Source Technology Centre