Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Redesign Memory Management layer and more core subsystem

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>]

Dear Christoph Lameter,

On Mon, 16 Jun 2014 09:05:31 -0500 (CDT), Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Jun 2014, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:
> 
> > I might be completely out of topic here, but this very much sounds like
> > what is happening for graphics. There is a DRM/KMS kernel side, which
> > does all the mode setting, context allocation and things like that, and
> > then all the rest takes place in userspace, using hardware-specific
> > pieces of code in libdrm and other components of the graphics stack.
> 
> I thought about that too.
> 
> > If we translate that to networking, there would be a need to have all
> > of the setup/initialization done in the kernel, and then some
> > hardware-specific userspace libraries to use for the data path.
> 
> Well ideally these would just be API specific in order to support multiple
> devices.

Well, my understanding is that libdrm exposes on API, but internally
has support for various graphics hardware. Same for OpenGL: a unified
normalized API that applications can rely on, and pure user-space
implementations that know about the hardware details.

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com