Radeon Driver Rewrite Only Has A Few Things Left

[Fixxer_Linux]

Kick my ass if it has already been said, but, I have to say that I don't really understand what all these article is talking about : tiling, DRI2, mesa, KMS, MM, GEM/TTM etc.

I guess many readers of Phoronix are coders and then will flawlessly and undoubtfully understand what it's all about, but I should be considered as an end-user. I don't have any knowledge in programming but I'm interested in Linux stuff and linux progress.

What is missing in this article (or perhaps in another article) is some explanation of what all these stuff is going to good for the end-user and daily use of my box.

I guess the stuff talked about in this article is very nice but is also very reserved to some few devs.

To say that I'm missing a lot some explanation article as you would explain it to your grand'ma if she would have a Linux box and was waiting patiently for improvments. How would you explain that to her ? (ok, she doesnt even have a box, so, let say your girl-friend or your wife if you like ! ).

But perhaps am I amongst the few of being just a linux end-user without any programming knowledge ? Usually, simple users tend to stay in Windows, as it's easier to manage. So let say I'm a power-user, but I would understand you don't want to lose time for explaining things to simple linux users, which are perhaps not the more linux representatives ?

[bridgman]

As I understand it the radeon-rewrite code can run on the current non-memory-managed framework (without DRI2), but if you run it on a system with GEM/TTM, KMS and DRI2 it will make use of those features and give you the associated benefits, like RDR (aka glxgears on a spinning cube ).

The radeon-rewrite effort adds support for all the new features in the X/DRI stack, but allows the devs to use almost all the same code today rather than having to maintain old and new code bases over the next year as distros gradually move from the current stack to the new one (with KMS, MM, DRI2 etc..).

[Dragoran]

That sounds like DRI2/KMS would be possible with this branch.

But GEM is needed before any of these work, right? So any chance this will happen in time for Mesa 7.5 anyway? Am I missing something?

Anyways, great job devs

You don't need GEM but a memory manager DR12/KMS for radeon will be in Fedora 11 (already is but needs fixes mentioned in the blog)

[d2kx]

That sounds like DRI2/KMS would be possible with this branch.

But GEM is needed before any of these work, right? So any chance this will happen in time for Mesa 7.5 anyway? Am I missing something?

Anyways, great job devs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon Driver Rewrite Only Has A Few Things Left

Back in February we talked about the work that David Airlie is doing to rewrite the ATI Radeon driver for Mesa. Soon it now looks like this rewritten code may land in the mainline Mesa code-base once a few more items are addressed...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzE2MQ