On 4/13/06, Dieter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > But Timothy is looking for projects that don't depend on video: >
At least nothing complex. If we had a simple RISC processor design that was worth-while to put into an FPGA, we could do someone's X server-on-a-card idea. In fact, we've got everything we need for a powerful terminal. We can hook up serial, USB, ethernet, keyboard, and mouse to the I/O bus on OGD1. We can put a CPU with basic video logic into the FPGA. The CPU can have a few special instructions to speed up some drawing operations, but most of the drawing would come from regular general-purpose code plus perhaps a bitblt-offload-engine. I'm not sure where we'd store the X server and basic OS kernel, though. I suppose we could put a monitor/dumb terminal program in the PROM that could accept an OS image upload/download from somewhere else over the network. For my computer arch class, I have "Computer Architecture A Quantitative Approach" by Hennessy and Patterson. From reading that, I could slap together a MIPS processor that lacked float. The video circuitry is easy. The memory controller is not particularly hard. Given that, the blt engine would be simple enough. We'd have a unified video+program memory architecture. It wouldn't be too hard to rip out of X.org everything but the basics plus a simple DDX that could use the blt engine. Although it wouldn't be fast, we could probably get Mesa to run on it. The thing is, companies have tried over and over to sell stand-alone X terminals, and they never had much success. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
