[lug] anyone know how PCI-E works with Xorg X11 hardware accel?

[D. Stimits]

Matt Thompson wrote:
> D. Stimits wrote:
> 
>> I'm curious about something...it used to be everyone with hardware 
>> accel had an AGP slot video card. To get hardware accel, the X11 
>> server had to be set for this, plus a kernel module had to be enabled 
>> for using the AGP slot. With PCI Express, there is no more AGP slot, 
>> but there is a PCI-E driver. Does the X11 server not care if the 
>> source of the hardware accel is AGP versus PCI-E? Or is the server 
>> unaware of and uncaring of how it gets this ability? Does one PCI-E 
>> driver fit all hardware accel PCI-E video cards? And is it ready for 
>> "prime time" (especially on nVidia cards)?
> 
> 
> Well, my latest box that I was asking about before is a new Dell with a 
> PCIe 6800.  And I get the requisite 8000 fps or whatever from glxgears 
> with the nVidia drivers.  And ppracer does work well, 120 fps with all 
> the video whizbang I could figure out.
> 
> Now, I'm not sure about the Xorg driver, nv, but it did work for the 
> short time before I downloaded nVidia's drivers.  Maybe to get all that 
> DRI jazz working takes more.  All this was without much effort on my 
> side and the rather basic anaconda/xorgconf xorg.conf file from Fedora:
> 
> Section "Device"
>         Identifier  "Videocard0"
>         Driver      "nvidia"
>         VendorName  "Videocard vendor"
>         BoardName   "NVIDIA Unknown (generic)"
> EndSection
> 
> Someday I'll try to figure out if there are more Option's I need here, 
> but it works just fine like that.

That sounds exceptionally nice. It could mean the end of needing to 
custom compile a new AGP driver to fit both the kernel version and the 
X11 server version. If they've managed to treat hardware accel just like 
any other PCI device, life will be simplified for OpenGL installs. If 
you had used the "nvidia" driver line without some form of hardware 
accel being available, I'm sure the system would have instantly died.

D. Stimits, stimits AT comcast DOT net