Felix Kühling wrote:
It could waste a lot of RAM.
But is this a problem? It surely eats away some of the 3GB user address
space I believe (afaik the low-mem kernel address space agpgart takes is
gone anyway), but unless the driver is really stupid and just fills it
up even if it doesn't need to then I can't see a problem.
Apparently drivers tend to be stupid. ;-) Just this morning I happened
to play around with the AGPSize parameter on my notebook (Savage). After
reducing it from 32MB to 4MB I have 28MB more memory available (as seen
by free). This is quite significant with 256MB of RAM and a shared
memory graphics chip.
I'm not sure about the details of how AGP space is handled now. But
AFAIK once the Xserver has started any 3D client can put textures into
AGP space and the graphics card must be able to address that data. So
pages have to be allocated statically to the AGP aperture on Xserver
startup, otherwise this won't work. If this is correct than it's even
worse than wasting virtual memory, it wastes physical memory, since
pages in the AGP aperture must not be swapped to disk. Someone please
correct me if I'm wrong.
Oops, I guess this IS a problem then. Looks to me like the real solution
would be to dynamically allocate AGP space? The whole memory management
currently is really stupid, everything is completely static - buffers
(front, back, Z, offscreen pixmaps, and so on), AGP pages... It's a
complete waste of memory (video and it looks like system memory too).
Roland
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