Jerome's Radeon KMS Short-Term TODO List

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 7 February 2010 at 09:38 AM EST. 10 Comments
RADEON
After the earlier X talks today and then Luc's debated Linux graphics driver stack proposal (largely between he and Eric Anholt and Daniel Stone with conflicting views, but at least Intel admitting "there's a subset of users we care about and a subset we don't"), Jerome Glisse began talking about ATI Radeon kernel mode-setting and its current state. While most that read Phoronix regularly know the direction of Radeon KMS support for the coming releases, below is Jerome's short-term TODO list for the ATI kernel support.

Coming up in the Radeon DRM for the Linux 2.6.34 kernel (or releases thereafter) is support for un-mappable VRAM, support for Evergreen GPUs (Radeon HD 5000 "R800" series), use of the Linux power management API for better suspend-and-resume support, better DRM power management, HDMI audio for R700/800 graphics processors, and improved GPU lock-up recording.

Other plans on the code side include better fence for improved lock-up detection, using union to separate ASIC specific data, and better message prints for multi-GPU configurations.

The most common kernel mode-setting problems these days for ATI Radeon customers is coming down to mode detection issues, PLL issues on laptops with Mobility Radeon parts, ACPI/BIOS interaction problems, memory fragmentation, command submission issues, and GPU lock-ups.

Additionally, Jerome is hoping that his R600 Winsys code will be done within the next week or so. After that, Glisse hopes to create a Gallium3D R600 skeleton driver quite soon followed by work on a shader compiler, texture and sampler (will allow Quake 3 to work), various performance optimizations, and then work on the yet-to-be-written R600 Gallium3D driver.
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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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