Kernel support for graphics cards

[Dave Airlie]

On 1/8/06, The Rasterman Carsten Haitzler <raster at rasterman.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 08 Jan 2006 21:23:23 +1100 Bojan Smojver <bojan at rexursive.com> babbled:
>
> > I read Keith's excellent paper "The (Re)Architecture of the X Window
> > System" (http://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/xarch_ols2004/xarch-ols2004-html/)
> > and was encouraged by the direction that X is finally taking - the one of
> > rapid and modern development.
> >
> > I do have a few questions in relation to kernel support for graphics
> > cards though. Is hardware support for graphics cards in X going to be
> > marked deprecated in the near future (i.e. in favour of complete
> > Linux/*BSD/Solaris/<insert_flavour_here> kernel support)? If yes, will
> > it be accompanied by the dual release of X (i.e. one source tree with
> > deprecated hardware drivers, one with "hands-off" hardware), like we've
> > seen in the case of modularisation? And finally, is there a page on
> > freedesktop.org wiki that deals with the transition (specs for kernel
> > folks, status of kernel drivers, roadmap etc.)?
> >
> > PS. What prompted me to ask this is the following sentence from the
> > paper: "All of these systems directly manipulate hardware registers
> > without any coordination among them." That really scares me - it almost
> > sounds like the mess that DOS used to be...
>
> quick answer: no.  kernels are not going to have graphics drivers any time soon
> - if ever. :)

Well your not going to see hardware acceleration and things in the
kernel, but they're are a number of us that believe we need to
rearchitect things a lot in order to support EGL etc.. the moving of
the modesetting and monitor handing to a separate process with a
defined API which runs apart from whatever rendering engine is in use,
also a centralised video memory manager based in the kernel (with
userspace library doing a lot of the work). This would leave EGL to
run and the current X server could be converted to use the framework
and the drivers in the X server would just contain XAA or EXA
acceleration (converted to run on the modesetting and memory manager).

The work needed is fairly major, but just needs some focused effort
most likely from a paid developer to actually get it done.. (it's not
the most glamourous work and it's most definitely not suitable for a
newbie programmer...)

I'll be updating the presentation I gave last year at DDC/KS on the
future of Linux graphics for LCA in a couple of weeks, and I'll put it
up afer that..

Dave.