On 6/22/06, Terry Hancock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
That would actually be pretty cool. It would keep X from competing with ordinary application tasks for resources, which is often a source of hang-ups or slow performance on typical single-CPU Linux desktop machines.
With the exception of some pathological things (like PolyPoint and hitting against some of mi's O(n*n) or worse span rasterizing code), most things can be quickly dumped into a DMA buffer and shipped to the GPU while the X server sleeps. The reason for the high CPU usage is drivers that try to render mostly using PIO. I've looked at the Radeon driver, for instance, and it does everything but PutImage and GetImage using PIO. Our plan is to rely on DMA almost exclusively. With properly-written drivers, this competition won't happen.
It might be more practical to just go to dual processors or something, though I've never attempted that. An X server in hardware though, as a simple drop-in system has real potential, I would think. Would you then support the pointing device through the same card (seems like you would).
Well, a dual-processor system has historically been a lot more expensive than a single-processor system. What with all of these 2x processors now, that's changing. But you shouldn't throw hardware at something as a solution to bad software. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
