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Date:      Sat, 9 Nov 2019 13:24:20 +0200
From:      Damjan Jovanovic <damjan.jov@gmail.com>
Cc:        Hackers freeBSD <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: Linux PCI drivers in user space
Message-ID:  <CAJm2B-=Ki7-utUuLA42hpDC%2BFb2dfyo4XBCsphEY9o1yP0Q_0g@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20191109080032.231cd203@rimwks>
References:  <20191109080032.231cd203@rimwks>

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On Sat, Nov 9, 2019 at 7:00 AM Rozhuk Ivan <rozhuk.im@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi!
>
>
> Im frustrating with amdgpu on 12.1...
> Current status DRM with linuxkpi - it hard to use and hard to support.
> FreeBSD stable have no fresh drivers, FreeBSD current - unstable.
>
> But we have webcamd:
>  + almost all time fresh drivers from linux
>  + easy to pull drivers from linux
>  + easy to debug
>  + on crash - system continue work
>  + more secure - driver limited to process memory
>  - probably a bit slower
>
>
> If add some kernel module that will export all pci devices and
> allow to mmap() pci device memory to user space and somehow proxy
> IRQ (like events to poll()/kqueue()), IO ports and registers then
> webcamd will can work with this like it now works with USB devices,
> and fbsd users can use latest DRM and some other drivers.
> Also adding sysctl settings to webcamd devices will be very useful.
>
> Porting and updating drivers in user space webcamd easy then do same
> in kernel.
> Also all latest drivers will work on all actual FreeBSD versions.
>
>
(resent from the right source address...)

Hi

When last I checked, NVidia's driver interfaced with the BIOS, power
management, the x86 global descriptor table, and all kinds of other low
level hardware systems. Other graphics cards are probably similar. It will
take much more than just user-space PCI, to be able to run their drivers in
user space.

And if we do somehow get all-user-space graphics card drivers working, then
why would we want the Linux drivers? The Windows graphics stack is a lot
more actively developed. Wine and NDISulator both work with Windows
drivers, to some degree. Mac drivers might also be worth a look.



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