DRM Development Documentation (TTM, GEM, KMS, etc)

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 26 October 2009 at 05:34 PM EDT. 5 Comments
MESA
One of the common complaints that arise from hopeful X.Org / Mesa developers or those aspiring to contribute to this critical free software area is that there's not enough documentation that is up-to-date and covers the internals of the X Server, Mesa, DDX drivers, etc. Well, for those looking to get into any Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) work, a heap of new documentation is available. Intel's Jesse Barnes has invested a great deal of time in updating (well, creating) the DRM developer documentation.

Jesse's DRM developer DocBook covers the latest Linux graphics advancements like kernel mode-setting, the Graphics Execution Manager (GEM), TTM, vBlank, and other topics that will help developers in writing the initialization part of a graphics driver and implementing other Linux DRM features.

Obviously with topics like DRM initialization, memory management, and output management, this documentation is quite lengthy, but it's available for any interested developer to read and learn. This documentation, which appears to be well-written and thorough, can currently be viewed as a patch on the dri-devel mailing list but should be committed soon.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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