texture memory management question

[Michael Bautin]

Hello All,

I have a question about texture memory management in the r200 driver.
What is a primary need for a separate memory layout version for every client?
Would not it be simpler if there was only one memory heap in the sarea with a
global LRU list? Then there would be no need for heap layout synchronization
and region aging, as well as for a global LRU region list. And that would possibly
allow for economical memory management (we don't need to kick out up to 2MB
of other people's textures at once, we only need as much as we need). Also,
this would allow for texture sharing if we somehow could find out that someone else
is using exactly the same texture. Was that solution considered when the r200/radeon
driver was being designed? What difficulties that I have overseen would it imply?

Sorry for offtopic as this is not really related to the current r300 development activities.

Thank you.
Mikhail Bautin