Hi all, the company I am employed wants to support the further development of the geode driver. At the moment we are discusing this internaly how we could do this. Sure the best way would be to provide patches that gets included in next releases of the driver, but our knowledge in x11 driver development and the geode video hardware is quite limited and there is also a lack of man power. So we think the best way would be to sponsor some money so that a more suitable developer could work for full time as a freelancer on the driver. I am not sure how this developer could be at the moment.
As far as I can tell only one thing should be improved - the overall performance of the driver. --- Get rid of ping-pong pixmaps --- "All these fallbacks would also be less costly, if we didn't end up migrating the pixmaps out temporarily from video memory to system memory. I believe that theoretically pixman based software fallbacks could be done inside video memory, but I didn't get EXA classic mode convinced of that yet to try it out. As in, video memory is really just CPU memory too, just framebuffer memory set aside into which hardware accelerated operations can put their result in; so if we were doing software operations in there as well if there's enough room, without migrating out of there, we could avoid the costly part of copying memory around too much and fix it for all cases to not be SO big of a performance hit, while it'd be still nice to do in hardware what is possible." [1] "All these fallbacks would also be less costly, if we didn't end up migrating the pixmaps out temporarily from video memory to system memory. I believe that theoretically pixman based software fallbacks could be done inside video memory, but I didn't get EXA classic mode convinced of that yet to try it out. As in, video memory is really just CPU memory too, just framebuffer memory set aside into which hardware accelerated operations can put their result in; so if we were doing software operations in there as well if there's enough room, without migrating out of there, we could avoid the costly part of copying memory around too much and fix it for all cases to not be SO big of a performance hit, while it'd be still nice to do in hardware what is possible." [2] I can not tell how much time this takes to implement it, but maybe Martin can give some assessment. What do you think about it? I am sorry that I do not write this mail from my company mail address but gmail has the better spam filter :) [1] http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-driver-geode/2011-April/001209.html [2] http://www.mail-archive.com/xorg-driver-geode@lists.x.org/msg00971.html -- Christian Gmeiner, MSc _______________________________________________ Xorg-driver-geode mailing list Xorg-driver-geode@lists.x.org http://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg-driver-geode