DRM2 Proposed At XDC2012

[phoronix]

Phoronix: DRM2 Proposed At XDC2012

Improvements to the Direct Rendering Manager were proposed on Friday during XDC2012...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE5MDg

[Malizor]

One benefit for what this would allow for non-technical readers is that it would allow for GPGPU (OpenCL/Compute) support without an X.Org Server running for the graphics drivers.

Sounds like a must have. Great!

[uid313]

Can this solve the problem of graphics card lockup?

Sometimes the device driver is buggy and the whole system crashes.

Windows handle this gracefully and resumes from lockups by restarting the driver.

[agd5f]

Can this solve the problem of graphics card lockup?

Sometimes the device driver is buggy and the whole system crashes.

Windows handle this gracefully and resumes from lockups by restarting the driver.

The open source drivers do this too, but some lockups are not always recoverable.

[agd5f]

Many of these features are already available as part of the drm rendernode stuff Dave and later Iliga worked on:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...ch/020765.html

[uid313]

Windows handle this gracefully and resumes from lockups by restarting the driver.

Yes, this is very useful on headless servers, GPU computing clusters, etc.

The open source drivers do this too, but some lockups are not always recoverable.

Yes, my nouvoue locks up when I try to run Weston. It sucks.
Windows recovers from GPU driver lockups.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows...y_Driver_Model

[marek]

Windows doesn't recover from GPU lockups. The driver must be able to recover itself.

Windows does recover from a crash of the userspace part of the driver, but you'll get a BSOD anyway if the kernel part of the driver crashes.

[uid313]

Windows doesn't recover from GPU lockups. The driver must be able to recover itself.

Windows does recover from a crash of the userspace part of the driver, but you'll get a BSOD anyway if the kernel part of the driver crashes.

Oh, I didn't know.

And on Linux, it always crashes?
Doesn't graphics drivers on Linux have built-in recovery features?

Can the Linux device drivers be improved?
Or the Linux subsystems (DRM?, DRI?, etc?) to better handle bugs and instability?

[agd5f]

Oh, I didn't know.

And on Linux, it always crashes?
Doesn't graphics drivers on Linux have built-in recovery features?

Linux graphics drivers attempt to recover the GPU when it locks up as well. Sometime it's possible, sometimes it's not. It depends on the nature of the lockup.

Can the Linux device drivers be improved?
Or the Linux subsystems (DRM?, DRI?, etc?) to better handle bugs and instability?

Sure. There's always room for improvement.