Newbie Question: How to extend the i810 driver

[Eric Anholt]

On Sun, 2007-09-23 at 23:37 -0700, Vlad wrote:
> Joseph Adams wrote:
> 
> > I'm a newbie to driver development (of any kind) and 
> > I'm wondering where a good place to start learning 
> > driver development would be. Specifically, I want to
> > improve (or help someone improve) the i810 driver so
> > the performance of an Intel 82845G/GL (my graphics
> > chipset) on Linux is more on par to Windows.  I really
> > think the reduced framerate of many 3D games on Linux
> > using this card is due to lack of support for many 3D
> > primitive drawing functions available in the chipset.
> >  I just don't have a clue where to get documentation for
> > the 82845G/GL or how the heck people "hack up" graphics
> > drivers.  I know this is a broad question, I just want
> > to know a good starting point (beyond downloading and
> > building the source code).  Thanks!
> >
> > P.S.  This is my first post to a mailing list, so
> > please don't be offended if I don't notice the response
> > to my question soon after it is posted (but I'll try to
> > look for it).
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I don't know if you'd be interested in this idea, but it would be nice
> to merge the i810 TV-out code [1] from the NV-TV-Out project into
> X.org's Intel driver [2]. The latter only supports chipsets 915GM and
> higher, while the former supports a lot of earlier chipsets as well.
> 
> [1]
> http://nv-tv-out.cvs.sourceforge.net/nv-tv-out/nvtv/src/
>     back_i810.c
>     back_i810.h
>     data_i810.c
>     data_i810.h
>     gui_i810.c
>     gui_i810.h
>     i810_type.h
>     tv_i810.c
>     tv_i810.h

GPLed nvtv code would be unlikely to be accepted into the
xf86-video-intel driver.  For TV-out on chipsets before the 915, the
specs are almost always public, so just writing the DVO driver shouldn't
be hard.  That also means eventually getting to share code with other
drivers that need to support that DVO chip as well.

-- 
Eric Anholt                             anholt at FreeBSD.org
eric at anholt.net                         eric.anholt at intel.com

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/attachments/20070924/fef5be34/attachment.pgp>