Re: [Syllable-kernel] Third party graphics drivers

[Daniel G. <da...@fp...>]

On Sat, 2005-10-15 at 00:41 +0200, c....@fr... wrote:
> hello all,
> 
> I recently read a whole lot of MSDN documentation about the LDDM
> infrastructure. The new Windows graphics vista driver model.
> 
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/Display_d/hh/Display_d/DisplayDriverModel_Guide_c96d975e-dcc9-49b5-be73-b4d8b9f06eb8.xml.asp
> 
> And what made me think we could have support for it in other OSes.
> 
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/Display_d/hh/Display_d/DisplayDriverModel_Guide_c96d975e-dcc9-49b5-be73-b4d8b9f06eb8.xml.asp
> 
> It seem to me that having the most important parts of the driver
> being in user mode would really help to use it on other systems.
> 
> with a PE binary loader and with some kernel support
> maybe it would be possible to use LDDM drivers in syllable.
> 
> >From what I read, the user mode driver would create the
> command buffer that would need to be uploaded to the
> GPU and the kernel module would need to schedule GPU
> access handle memory of the GPU and send the command
> buffer to it.
> 
> sorry if it sound crazy...

Well, if the driver interface is well defined enough (and I haven't read
it so I don't know), then it could be done.  ndiswrapper allows windows
network drivers to be used on Linux, and it's possible because of the
well defined NDIS API.  So, it's potentially not crazy, but it depends
on how the drivers are written and used.

Daniel