[Nouveau] How Video Cards Work.

[Chris Ball]

On Sat, May 12, 2007 at 07:37:06PM +0300, Pekka Paalanen wrote:
> I have started a page aimed to be an introduction to working with
> (Nouveau) graphics from the driver side. I do not know what I am
> missing and what is relevant, so I'd like to have comments or people
> could improve the page themselves.
> 
> http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/IntroductoryCourse
> 
> This is by no means supposed to a replacement for the long-waited
> Nouveau driver crash course, but more of a prerequisite.

Great!  This is really excellent, much needed work.

A few months ago someone called Honza Havlicek was working on a wiki
page to try and document the nVidia architecture, which he called
"Developer Guidebook".  It's at:
   http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/HonzaHavlicek

I e-mailed Honza a few days ago to ask if he's still interested in
hacking on nouveau, but no reply yet.  My hope is that we could work
together on this document to bring it up to being a complete and
accurate mid-level description of how we render with 3D.

I also found this document recently:
   http://rivatv.sourceforge.net/stuff/riva128.txt

It's outdated, but the "Example: How to render a solid rectangle?"
section makes a lot of sense.  Between Honza's description of the MMIO 
registers and the functional descriptions at the URL above, I think we 
could get to a point where we're able to explain how rendering works 
to someone sufficiently interested.  :)

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>