On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 11:57, Dave Jones wrote: > I don't maintain upstream DRM, but I have a fair amount of responsibility > regarding the Fedora kernel, and I'll state publically that looking at > bugs in drivers/char/drm is right up there on my list of > "things I'd rather not do after lunch". Maintainability goes much > further than 'the guy that wrote the code can grok it'. > > People trying to pick up 3d driver programming on Linux have a huge > hurdle in their place, as that code resembles *NO OTHER* driver code > in the tree.
Here, I'd note that I got started in the DRM because I was interested in 3D drivers, but the actual 3D drivers were far bigger hurdles compared to understanding even some nasty kernel spaghetti. Of course, this is not to say that we don't have a ton of room for improvement in the DRM, without even going back to having a generic DRM library. One of the things that I think would be nice to see is the gamma DMA made to be like the rest of the drivers, in which case a lot of code related to just that driver could be removed. We could also do some significant cleanups if we could allow ourselves to remove old interface mistakes eventually. This has been made harder than it should be by the long turnaround times for new monolithic X releases, which is finally changing now. > > >ian: what about splitting the current memory management code into a > > >module that can be swapped for your new version? > > > > AFAIK, the only drivers that have any sort of in-kernel memory manager > > are the radeon (only used by the R200 driver) and i830. > > ISTR SiS has some memory management code too, though I've not looked > too closely at that for a long time. The SiS (and via, which copied it) memory management has way too much code for what little it has to do. I've replaced it and made it smaller in terms of code and binary size, 64-bit clean, and (I think) much more readable. I'm going to take a look at committing it once I can drag myself away from X.Org, at which point someone with via hardware could do the same for theirs. -- Eric Anholt [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.freebsd.org/~anholt/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by OSTG. Have you noticed the changes on Linux.com, ITManagersJournal and NewsForge in the past few weeks? Now, one more big change to announce. We are now OSTG- Open Source Technology Group. Come see the changes on the new OSTG site. www.ostg.com -- _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
