On Fri, 2016-12-09 at 09:34 +0100, Daniel Vetter wrote:
Yeah if you have discrete vram then your dumb display driver isn't all that pretty. We essentially just have the few drivers Dave hacked up to be able to boot some servers. And there's definitely lots of room for more shared code for those, and also some better infrastructure and helpers to share more cod and make them better.
The massive pile of dumb framebuffers we all merged over the past 2 years all use system/dma memory for scanout, and for those we have the very nice cma helpers that take care of everything for you.
Do they work if the system/DMA memory has to be physically contiguous and at a fixed address ? The AST "ARM side" GPU is like that.
So it is possible, only reason vram dumb buffers look worse is that there's only 3 and no one cares about them, vs about 20 and a very active community of contributors (also for core drm improvements) for the other case.
Well, we could move offb to drm while at it I suppose that would be another one (offb is the "dumb driver based on pre-programmed output by firmware).
Althought the MXSFB driver that just landed does use ttm and vram, so maybe that's now improving too.
Cheers, Ben.