Re: [Dri-devel] DRI without Kernel

[Daryll S. <da...@va...>]

On Fri, Oct 20, 2000 at 12:52:33PM -0500, Chris Edgington wrote:
> Lets pretend that we have a piece of hardware whereby we do all accelerations in PIO mode. If we
> create a library of hardware accleration routines with no global data, make each of those routines
> use structures that we put in the SAREA and make the routines properly grab and release the lock, is
> it feasible that we could create an Xserver and DRI GL client that did not require a device specific
> kernel driver (except for memory mapping, etc.) Is hardware interrupt handling the only hard,
> concrete reason why code needs to reside in the kernel?

Arbitration for the lock occurs in the kernel driver. You probably also
need to memory map regions of the board which come from the kernel
driver. The security model for accessing the device is handled by the
kernel module. Interrupt handling and DMA dispatching are also kernel
functions if you use them.

Bottom line is that you will need to have a device specific kernel
module for your DRI driver. 

						- |Daryll