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

David Sin
2010-12-22T14:22:18Z

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