On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 08:20:31AM +0100, Keith Whitwell wrote:
José Fonseca wrote:
The Gamma DRM driver is quite peculiar in several aspects. I'd like to know if those differences are result of experiments which might be worth to generalise to other drivers or if instead it's mostly deprecated and should be made more equal to the others.
It is mostly deprecated and should be made more equal to the others.
For one instance, the Gamma is the only one uses the freelists which the source of other drivers refer it would be used there too. On the other hand most of the gamma source duplicates source in the DRM templates.
Hmm -- for a long time there was #if __HAVE_OLD_DMA in the drm templates, giving a more complex dma engine. The gamma driver was the only one to define it and I recently moved that code into gamma_* files -- so now it probably does look like duplication.
The current oddity situation is not very convenient since it limits the kind of changes (either janitorial or architectural) one can do without breaking the gamma driver.
The alternatives are 1) fix the gamma driver (hard) or 2) fork the gamma driver off - move everything it needs into a gamma_*.[ch] file and continue developing everything else independently.
I for one want to write a general API for DMA buffer pools to be shared by all drivers, but I need some advice concerning what my position towards the Gamma source code should be.
I'd like to just remove the whole driver, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be an option. With a card it should only be a week or two's work to get it in line with the other drivers, or seperating it from the other drivers would take a day or two, but be messier.
Well I wouldn't want to remove the driver as a matter of principle - we already support a small subset of the existing 3D cards and I wouldn't want to see that number further reduced. Seperating it from the other drivers would indeed be very messier and difficult to maintain in the future.
So what I'm going to do is to focus on the all other drivers now and in the end get the gamma in line with them. It's not feasible to do make this while keeping binary compability (the gamma driver even exposes read interface for the file), i.e., the driver will refuse to work with previous versions. This shouldn't be a problem attending the appereantly very low number of users of this driver.
BTW, do we have a owner of such card among the subscribers which can do some testing when the time comes?
I think Alan Cox. Alan Hourihane had one, but I think it died -- I find it very hard to keep gamma details in my head for some reason.
Keith
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