> First, I took a look at the current radeon source, > but if someone could explain me what the ringbuffer > and the freelist are, i think i would at least > be able to imagine something of what's supposed to happen.
Maybe you should start reading about advanced c programming technics first? (Okay, Pascal will do the job as well.) advanced here means programming with mutexes, semaphores, interrupts, object handles, buffering, chaching, memory management and all that makes up a true multitasking OS. Of course you can still do a good job at open source movement, even if you have only standard c knowledge in the beginning. But i will explain for you below... ringbuffer = fifo alike object in contiguous memory range, written by a pointer an read by a second pointer, the pointers are moving in only one direction and are wrapped at some limit, having both pointer the same value means buffer empty and write pointe one before read pointer means buffer full, most famous representative of ringbuffer is a keyboard buffer, in terms of grafics the buffer is read by the grafics adapter and filled in with commands or data by the host cpu. freelist = (i dont know exactly, not watched that source), maybe here its just a memory manager that contains a list of linked pointers to account chunks of memory that is free for usage in the system, when to free objects are adjancent then they get merged, when there is a memory request that requires less than the object provides then the object is split according to the request, possible applications are GART ranges, mem pools, texture mem, offscreen heap. If you want to understand some particular hardware programming you will be in need for the chip documentation or at least for someone who explains the main concepts of the participating devices that specific area. Regards Alex. _______________________________________________________________ Don't miss the 2002 Sprint PCS Application Developer's Conference August 25-28 in Las Vegas -- http://devcon.sprintpcs.com/adp/index.cfm _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
