On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 2:46 AM, Michael Cree
Hello list
I've been incommunicado for a while. Overloaded with work commitments and had a non-working X server on my home computer architecture (Alpha) for quite a while. But now the X server (v1.7.1) works on Alpha, and hopefully I may have a little bit of spare time, so might be able to participate in the radeonhd community again.
Looking at the commits for the last few months there seem to be noticeably fewer commits to the radeonhd driver than the ati driver. Would it be a valid perception that efforts to continue developing the radeonhd driver have dried up a little recently? (Or is that an artefact of radeonhd supporting only recent radeon cards?)
Is there any intention to get KMS into radeonhd? That is something I am planning to test over the next couple of weeks but I note that I am limited to the ati driver.
I don't know of any concrete plans to add kms support to radeonhd (although it's been mentioned a few times), but I'm not sure the work is worth the effort. The main differentiating factor between radeon and radeonhd is the modesetting code. When KMS is active, radeon is basically just kms ioctls for modesetting and memory management and the accel code. As the accel code is very similar between radeon and radeonhd, the drivers would end up looking just about identical. In my opinion, time would be better spent improving kms or working on gallium.
I had indicated an interest in implementing the DCT and motion estimation on the shader units to provide hardware acceleration of MPEG video some time back. I have been far too busy and haven't even done any background work whatsoever to learn about the shader units. I presume this is still up in the air and that there is no serious effort yet to implement such features, right?
There's been some work to implement video decode acceleration in mesa via gallium. In that case, video decode acceleration would just work on any gallium driver. Currently the r300 gallium driver (for r3xx-r5xx radeons) is fairly far along, but the r600 one has barely started; mostly just some experiments. The advantage of gallium is that new front ends can be added to support acceleration of new APIs without requiring a new driver for each one. There is already work to support OpenGL, OpenCL, OpenVG, EXA, and video decode on top of gallium. Alex
Cheers Michael. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: radeonhd+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: radeonhd+help@opensuse.org
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