[Openchrome-devel] Future of via drm and unichrome 3D driver.

[Thomas Hellström]

Bruce and Harald.

Based on some work previously done by Tungsten Graphics I have a 
completely reworked VIA drm module and  unichrome 3D driver based on Mesa.

The DRM module removes old unneeded stuff, includes a complete memory 
manager similar to Intel's GEM and a stable AGP command submission 
mechanism with buffer object and fences. This in principle makes AGP 
memory unlimited to all clients and VRAM is swapped on-demand using the 
DMA engines.

The main features of the 3D driver is OpenGL 1.3 support (save cube maps 
and some texture border modes), accelerated pixel operations and pixel 
buffer objects, S3TC compression, accelerated GL_EXT frame buffer 
objects and greatly enhanced stability and multi-thread / multi-context 
operation. What's not included yet is faked texture rectangle and 
sub-buffer buffer swaps.

I'm not sure what's the best way to incorporate this together with VIA's 
recent changes, but i guess the best suggestion is to create an 
"openchrome" drm and 3D driver and slowly move the chrome9 stuff over, 
and obsolete the old via drm driver. I don't think the naming issue is 
really important ATM, it could be called via2 or whatever.

The code is still "resting" while clearing some copyright issues, but it 
would be good to hear VIA's opinion before introducing to the dri community.

Thanks,


Thomas Hellstr?m