DRM/DRI Update

Thomas White taw at bitwiz.org.uk
Wed May 6 16:58:56 CEST 2009


On Wed, 6 May 2009 13:17:43 +0200
Rafael Campos <methril at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's planned to put some effort in KMS (Kernel Mode Settings)?
> It's some performance benchmarks planned? I'd like to see the benefits
> of this :)

Yes, KMS is definitely "on the list" for future work.

A quick note about speed: DRI isn't going to increase the speed of any
operations which are already accelerated.  In fact, if anything it'll slow
them down a little bit, since there's an extra overhead of one ioctl and some
sanity checks in the kernel.  I don't know whether this will be significant
or not.

What DRI does do is to give us a framework where multiple applications can
use different Glamo features without treading on each others' toes.  I hope
that the framework can be used to make much fuller use of the acceleration we
have: OpenGL, video acceleration, JPEG acceleration, and so on, to give us a
net speedup in the user experience.  Raster's concerns about writing large
amounts of platform-specific code are noted, but the chip is there: so let's
see what we can make it do.  Even if the results turn out to be
disappointing, it's still a stimulating project for me right now.

Tom



More information about the devel mailing list