Airlie: raspberry pi drivers are NOT useful

Posted Oct 25, 2012 22:51 UTC (Thu) by ssam (guest, #46587)
Parent article: Airlie: raspberry pi drivers are NOT useful

kind of like a printer that accepts postscript. sounds ok to me.

(maybe different if the GPU can read and write to system RAM (can it).)

Airlie: raspberry pi drivers are NOT useful

Posted Oct 25, 2012 23:04 UTC (Thu) by mansr (guest, #85328) [Link]

The GPU on that chip is in full control of the system. The ARM core can only do what the GPU lets it, not the other way around as people are probably used to.

Airlie: raspberry pi drivers are NOT useful

Posted Oct 26, 2012 8:11 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

Of course it can! But so can your IDE chipset, your soundcard and your Ethernet card. What's so unique about GPU and GLES?

Airlie: raspberry pi drivers are NOT useful

Posted Oct 26, 2012 8:26 UTC (Fri) by Otus (subscriber, #67685) [Link] (1 responses)

Not if they are behind an IOMMU, like on most of the recent x86 platforms. Right?

Airlie: raspberry pi drivers are NOT useful

Posted Oct 26, 2012 17:14 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Right, but IDE and Ethernet drivers were in Linux 20 years ago, IOMMU is relatively recent creation.

If the GPU development will shift to something like Broadcom is pushing I'm pretty sure interface with GPU will receive something like IOMMU in 20 years time.