On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 1:18 AM, Arnd Bergmann arnd@arndb.de wrote:
On Monday 13 December 2010, Jammy Zhou wrote:
On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 4:45 AM, Linus Walleij linus.walleij@linaro.orgwrote:
On 11 December 2010 22:41, Arnd Bergmann arnd@arndb.de wrote:
- amd-gpu -- a single but huge driver for the GPU. As is normally the
case with GPU drivers, we can expect long discussions before it will get considered for mainline 4 patches 98 files changed, 278321 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
Just out of curiosity, following the discussion between Dave Airlie and Codeaurora this summer re GPU driver shims.
Is the AMD GPU exposing all functionality in its kernel driver or is there some userspace blob somewhere with lots of e.g. GL goodies?
All the functionality for the kernel driver of AMD GPU Z430/Z160 (now belongs to Qualcom) is exposed. But we need accompanied userspace library to call these functionality (buffer management, command submission, ...).
Who owns these components? If it's closed source, the only options we have are lobbying for complete release of the specs for a reimplementation or reverse-engineering the drivers, which may at least get easier with a user space driver than it would be with a kernel driver.
Yeah even with the open kernel bits it makes no sense to upstream if they never release the userspace, since a GPU stack is a hw to sw interface stack you can't design a 3D userspace driver without having control of the kernel userspace interface, so setting an ABI in stone for something that forces anyone doing future development down a strict path is of no benefit.
Dave.