Finally: More DRM Driver Documentation

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Finally: More DRM Driver Documentation

A developer while working to create a Renesas SH Mobile DRM driver ended up writing a fairly thorough DRM kernel framework documentation for those looking to write these kernel GPU drivers...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTExMTM

[marek]

but for the open-source GPU drivers when it comes to DRM, X.Org, and Mesa/Gallium3D it's even worse.

There's Gallium3D documentation in src/gallium/docs of the Mesa repository. I don't think the documentation is so needed though, because Gallium3D is very similar to Direct3D 11, which is documented very well.

[droidhacker]

What the hell is a Renesas and why should I care?

[Jonimus]

What the hell is a Renesas and why should I care?

Renesas makes microprocessors such as the SuperH and RX series that competes with ARM and others in the embeded world. Many of thoses embeded devices run linux and have display controllers. So some renesas dev was nice enough to document the DRM kernel api for other driver devs while he was working on a drm driver for some embedded SH chip with display hardware. My question is, which superh chip is this for and has it been merged upstream?

[uid313]

We, the Linux and open source community often complain about companies not providing device drivers for Linux and other free open source operating systems.

But then we no or poor documentation on how to implement device drivers?

Microsoft provides developers with the Windows Driver Kit that comes with documentation, samples, build environments, and tools for driver developers.

This is great of this developer, and I hope in the future we see more high-quality documentation.

[plonoma]

Here are two good suggestions:
1) Make self documenting, clear, easy to understand code.
Making a problem easier by dividing it into smaller functions. Subroutines are your friend.

2) Use xml comments.
These are a special kind of comments that are in the source code.
With doxygen you can generate nice help documentation out of it.
They can stay very well in sync because they are in the source code.