A Technical Explanation Of Intel's GEM

Back in May while open-source X developers were bickering about their TTM memory manager concerns, Intel's Keith Packard chimed in and announced Intel's Graphics Execution Manager, or GEM for short. The Graphics Execution Manager is Intel's replacement of Tungsten's TTM for their xf86-video-intel graphics driver. GEM seems to make memory management simpler and address some of the TTM shortcomings.

Last month we then shared that Intel is coming close to merging GEM with a new version of DRM and the Intel graphics driver. For those more interested in the underlying technical details of the Graphics Execution Manager, Keith Packard has written a blog posting describing it in more details. Keith had shared his proposed GEM kernel patches, how data is written to the GPU with GEM, and the tiling and memory channels.

It's a lengthy post, but if you're interested in some technical weekend reading, head on over to Keith's blog.