Re: [PATCH 0/9] TI DMM-TILER driver

[David Sin <davidsin@ti.com>]

On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 09:28:07AM +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 5:02 AM, David Sin <davidsin@ti.com> wrote:
> I get the impression with the ARM graphics, that you just have a lot
> of separate drivers for separate IP blocks all providing some misc
> random interfaces to userspace where some binary driver binds all the
> functionality together into a useful whole, which seems like a really
> bad design.
> 
> Generally on x86, the tiling hw is part of the GPU and is exposed as
> part of a coherent GPU driver.
> 
> I'm just wonder what the use-cases for this tiler are and what open
> apps can use it for?
> 
> Dave.
Yes -- on the omap4 soc, the dmm-tiler hw block is separate from the 
gpu.  I've had some, but not much, past discusions on hw designs 
where graphics/video related ip blocks are part of the same core.  It's 
a good point that you bring up and it certainly makes sense to me.  
I will bring it up with some omap hw folks that I know, and see if 
something that can be considered in future omap versions.
 
Some of the use-cases are HD video decoding and encoding.  Also, 
hi-res image capture -- I believe 12MP or greater.  OpenMax IL components 
and other multimedia frameworks can allocate video memory 
through a user space tiler library.  Thanks for your comments, Dave.  
-- 
David Sin