Kroah-Hartman: AF_BUS, D-Bus, and the Linux kernel
Posted Feb 14, 2013 5:48 UTC (Thu) by
brouhaha (subscriber, #1698)
In reply to:
Kroah-Hartman: AF_BUS, D-Bus, and the Linux kernel by Cyberax
Parent article:
Kroah-Hartman: AF_BUS, D-Bus, and the Linux kernel
I'm not sure about VT handoff or interaction with V4L, but none of the other features that you've mentioned are especially better due to being in the kernel. There are suitable mechanisms for all of them for user-space processes. If there weren't, we'd invent some.
If VT handoff or interaction with V4L have some particularly tricky requirements, then perhaps doing those from userspace might need some additional infrastructure.
I'm not saying that I think we should go back to exactly the same userspace graphics code we used to have. There were definitely things wrong with those. However, moving chunks of it into the kernel isn't the only way to solve the problems we had.
Userspace GPU drivers never performed well.
That might be true, though I never personally had any significant performance issues with them. But even if it was true, I don't think there's anything inherent to the problem that prevents it from being done in userspace with performance comparable to what we get in kernel space. That's certainly what we found at the very big router company. There's nothing magic about being in kernel space that makes code run significantly faster. Certainly in user space you need to avoid doing things that involve copying memory from one process address space into kernel space then again into another process address space. Naively designed code tends to do a lot of that, but it's quite possible and not even that difficult to avoid it by using modern OS facilities.
Besides, all this shiny new GPU infrastructure allows to kill off stuff that REALLY should not be in the kernel: VT102 emulator for kernel framebuffers.
I'd be perfectly happy to have neither in the kernel, but if I had to choose between one or the other, I'd definitely keep the relatively small, simple, lightweight VT102 emulator in the kernel and put the big, complicated GPU stuff in user space.
I never expected anyone to take my comments about this very seriously. I don't have the time or inclination to work on GPU drivers. The people that actually do the work get to make the technical decisions about it, and I wouldn't have it any other way. This is just an exercise in being an armchair quarterback.
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