On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 12:30 PM, PRASANNA KUMAR prasanna_tsm_kumar@yahoo.co.in wrote:

USB graphics devices from displaylink does not have 3D hardware. To get 3D effects (compiz, GNOME 3, KWin, OpenGL apps etc) with these device in Linux the native (primary) GPU can be used to provide hardware acceleration. All the graphics operation is done using the native (primary) GPU and the end result is taken and send to the displaylink device. Can this be achieved? If so is it possible to implement a generic framework so that any device (USB, thunderbolt or any new technology) can use this just by implementing device specific (compression and) data transport? I am not sure this is the correct mailing list.

fwiw, this situation is not too far different from the SoC world. For example, there are multiple ARM SoC's that share the same IMG/PowerVR core or ARM/mali 3d core, but each have their own unique display controller..

I don't know quite the best way to deal with this (either at the DRM/kernel layer or xorg driver layer), but there would certainly be some benefit to be able to make DRM driver a bit more modular to combine a SoC specific display driver (mostly the KMS part) with a different 2d and/or 3d accelerator IP. Of course the (or some of the) challenge here is that different display controllers might have different memory mgmt requirements (for ex, depending on whether the display controller has an IOMMU or not) and formats, and that the flip command should somehow come via the 2d/3d command stream.

I have an (experimental) DRM/KMS driver for OMAP which tries to solve the issue by way of a simple plugin API, ie the idea being to separate the PVR part from the OMAP display controller part more cleanly. I don't think it is perfect, but it is an attempt. (I'll send patches as an RFC, but wanted to do some cleanup first.. just haven't had time yet.) But I'm definitely open to suggestions here.

BR, -R

Thanks, Prasanna Kumar _______________________________________________ dri-devel mailing list dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel