Re: [RFC] Small PCI core patch

Benjamin Herrenschmidt
2005-11-22T23:02:08Z

On Tue, 2005-11-22 at 11:54 -0500, Jon Smirl wrote:
> On 11/21/05, Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org> wrote:
> > For those who haven't noticed, the latest generation of ATI cards have a
> > new 2D engine that is completely different from the previous one and
> > totally undocumented. So far, they haven't showed any plans to provide
> > any kind of documentation for it, unlike what they did for previous
> > chipsets, not even 2D and not even under NDA. That means absolutely _0_
> > support for it in linux or X.org except maybe with some future version
> > of their binary blob, and _0_ support for it for any non-x86
> > architecture of course.
>
> Are you sure it is a new 2D engine? ATI engineers have mentioned
> several times that they were looking at removing the 2D engine and
> going 3D only - using the 3D engine to draw the 2D data.

By new 2D engine, I meant the mode setting core.

> Removal of the 2D engines is a key vulnerability in the strategy of
> only using 2D on Linux.
>
> --
> Jon Smirl
> jonsmirl@gmail.com