Road to upstream: jglisse

I have been working on porting radeon kernel modesetting to new ttm developed at VMware by Thomas Hellstrom. Just to avoid confusion ttm is used inside the driver the API we expose to userspace is the GEM api. I cleaned up the radeon code along the way and i feel it's now ready for wider range of tester ! Few words on the code itself, there is now a split between old drm path and new kernel modesetting path, i did so in order to avoid breaking old path while also being able to have a clean design & code for new kernel modesetting path. I am quite happy with how the code looks now, of course i am not the only one guilty about all this work Dave Airlie and Alex Deucher did lot of the original modesetting work, Dave also worked hard in last few month on mesa radeon rewrite which has root into Nicolai Haehnle initial work. Big kudos to Maciej Cencora (aka Osiris) for all improvement he done on the code. So here is a screenshot of what you can get with kernel modesetting, a decent ddx and proper mesa (radeon-rewrite branch) :

radeon newttm screenshot

So if you feel adventurous here are things you need:

Kernel:
git clone git://people.freedesktop.org/~glisse/drm-next
cd drm-next
git branch drm-next-radeon origin/drm-next-radeon
git checkout drm-next-radeon
Then usual kernel configuration just enable fbcon,ttm and radeon kernel modesetting.

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/mesa/drm
cd drm
git branch modesetting-gem origin/modesetting-gem
git checkout modesetting-gem
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64
(libdir is only needed if on x86-64)
make
sudo make install

git clone git://people.freedesktop.org/~glisse/xf86-video-ati
cd xf86-video-ati
git branch radeon-gem-cs3 origin/radeon-gem-cs3
git checkout radeon-gem-cs3
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64
(libdir is only needed if on x86-64)
You also need the Xorg dev package from you distribution sudo yum-builddep xorg-x11-drv-ati.x86_64 (on fedora)
make
sudo make install

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/mesa/mesa
cd mesa
git branch radeon-rewrite origin/radeon-rewrite
git checkout radeon-rewrite
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64 --with-dri-drivers=radeon,r200,r300
(libdir is only needed if on x86-64)
make
sudo make install

Now once you reboot under new kernel you need to load radeon module with modeset=1, then your userspace should be all set, i know this needs many things to build but hopefully soon we could start merging little by little thing upstream and so it should end up in your distro. Anyway if you own an x200 (igp) or x1250/x1200 with intel CPU i would love to know if you got any issues with this code. Early tester are always appreciated and i would like to thanks spstarr, dilex, osiris, ... for their early testing and reporting on this code.

Forget to mention that suspend/resume should work flawlessly even if you are in a middle of quake3 game while spinning compiz cube (don't think it's a normal use case but you never know).

Of course performance are not yet what it used to be, but here is my todo list which should also bring us back somewhere near old performance and maybe even outperform old path :
-erase memory on bo allocation (security needed before upstreaming)
-more check on command stream (security needed before upstreaming)
-port & cleanup Dave's page allocator to avoid heavy cache flushing (performances)
-buffer swapping (performances)
-buffer tiling (performances)

Road to upstream

Weeks in the life of GPU driver developer

Radeon on the way to DRI2

Hyperz, it was a long time ago

Error

Weeks in the life of GPU driver developer

Radeon on the way to DRI2

Hyperz, it was a long time ago