Re: radeon, apertures & memory mapping

I don't think "normal" drivers do them at all. I did experiment with 
DirectFB at one point and had it place all offscreen surfaces to AGP 
memory. It worked really well on my hardware (G400 + VIA KT133 
northbridge). I also tried it with PCI transfers and that too worked but 
was naturally slower. I'd like to make DirectFB use AGP again since 32MB 
of video memory isn't always enough.

quoted

(Which is interesting, that means that if we want to copy something out
of video memory, we can't write it to AGP memory and then read it, we
need to actually do the blit from the CPU, good to know for our memory
manager. That also means that we have a problem if the video memory
isn't entirely accessible by the CPU ...)

What about PCI master writes? Are there bridges that don't support even 
those?

Usually, those work. I have a list of errata of Apple bridges at least
in Darwin, some do not support PCI master writes, but it's only
apparently some never-released revisions :)

quoted

That's something we should probably think about doing properly: Have a
list of AGP "issues" (errata ?) bits that are communicated by the AGP
host driver to the DRM.

At least all the early Apple AGP bridges don't do writes, and I remember
we have trouble with a few x86 ones as well. There are also issues when
a single AGP burst crosses a page boundary, and other things like that.

:(

-- 
Benjamin Herrenschmidt [off-list ref]