On Mon, 23 Oct 2006 20:40:02 +0200
Rodolphe Ortalo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Why can't you do without such a PCI bus simulator? (The board simulator
> model needs to interface with it?) It's not for the software only
> simulator I guess?
The idea was to simulate the PCI interface in an "real" enviroment,
so that we could be sure that the PCI interface works with standard
workload before we put it into hardware.
> Purely from the device driver software development point of view, we
> can't stick to OS-provided PCI API? (From what I know, all device
> programming is done via MMIO nowadays from the drivers, only the very
> early initialization part uses another way via a few PCI config regs to
> set up the MMIO spaces.)
> Btw, sorry if I said something stupid due to insuficient knowledge of
> the OGP specs (maybe there is no MMIO... in which case I'll have to
> check for a brown paper bag somewhere).
No, it's right. Most hardware these days use memory addresses
as an abstraction layer.
But using only the OS provided PCI interface does not suffice
in writing a sufficent test for the card. It would be possible
to write a driver if we had a c model this way, but then we
would need to test everything again against the real hw.
> Furthermore, driver development is only the first step. Ensuring
> adequate support at the Xorg and DRM level is needed nowadays to be a
> first-class citizen in the graphics board space. (Open specs and open
> documentation can do the rest afterwards - even without real hardware
> mass production IMHO.)
That's for me part of the driver development.
> Indeed, maybe sticking to the FPGA implementation is easiest in fine.
> The main advantage of the simulator is that it would be very easy and
> very cheap to distribute to many people; but that could prove too much
> additional work too (mainly on the software simulator probably).
> However, I still think that incorporating your own "device" into a
> system simulator like qemu or bochs may have some amusing side effects
> (like embedded applications developpers targeting an OGP-centric
> accelerated feature set without knowing).
That was one of the "nice sideeffects" we thought about.
Attila Kinali
--
Lotus Notes ist eine verteilte Datenbankapplikation,
als Sample ist eine miese Groupware dabei ;)
-- Lukas Beeler
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