man/drm.xml

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<!DOCTYPE refentry PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.2//EN"
          "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.2/docbookx.dtd">

<!--
  Written 2012 by David Herrmann <dh.herrmann@googlemail.com>
  Dedicated to the Public Domain
-->

<refentry id="drm">
  <refentryinfo>
    <title>Direct Rendering Manager</title>
    <productname>libdrm</productname>
    <date>September 2012</date>
    <authorgroup>
      <author>
        <contrib>Developer</contrib>
        <firstname>David</firstname>
        <surname>Herrmann</surname>
        <email>dh.herrmann@googlemail.com</email>
      </author>
    </authorgroup>
  </refentryinfo>

  <refmeta>
    <refentrytitle>drm</refentrytitle>
    <manvolnum>7</manvolnum>
  </refmeta>

  <refnamediv>
    <refname>drm</refname>
    <refpurpose>Direct Rendering Manager</refpurpose>
  </refnamediv>

  <refsynopsisdiv>
    <funcsynopsis>
      <funcsynopsisinfo>#include &lt;xf86drm.h&gt;</funcsynopsisinfo>
    </funcsynopsis>
  </refsynopsisdiv>

  <refsect1>
    <title>Description</title>
    <para>The <emphasis>Direct Rendering Manager</emphasis> (DRM) is a framework
          to manage <emphasis>Graphics Processing Units</emphasis> (GPUs). It is
          designed to support the needs of complex graphics devices, usually
          containing programmable pipelines well suited to 3D graphics
          acceleration. Furthermore, it is responsible for memory management,
          interrupt handling and DMA to provide a uniform interface to
          applications.</para>

    <para>In earlier days, the kernel framework was solely used to provide raw
          hardware access to priviledged user-space processes which implement
          all the hardware abstraction layers. But more and more tasks were
          moved into the kernel. All these interfaces are based on
          <citerefentry><refentrytitle>ioctl</refentrytitle><manvolnum>2</manvolnum></citerefentry>
          commands on the DRM character device. The <emphasis>libdrm</emphasis>
          library provides wrappers for these system-calls and many helpers to
          simplify the API.</para>

    <para>When a GPU is detected, the DRM system loads a driver for the detected
          hardware type. Each connected GPU is then presented to user-space via
          a character-device that is usually available as
          <filename>/dev/dri/card0</filename> and can be accessed with
          <citerefentry><refentrytitle>open</refentrytitle><manvolnum>2</manvolnum></citerefentry>
          and
          <citerefentry><refentrytitle>close</refentrytitle><manvolnum>2</manvolnum></citerefentry>.
          However, it still depends on the grapics driver which interfaces are
          available on these devices. If an interface is not available, the
          syscalls will fail with <literal>EINVAL</literal>.</para>

    <refsect2>
      <title>Authentication</title>
      <para>All DRM devices provide authentication mechanisms. Only a DRM-Master
            is allowed to perform mode-setting or modify core state and only one
            user can be DRM-Master at a time. See
            <citerefentry><refentrytitle>drmSetMaster</refentrytitle><manvolnum>3</manvolnum></citerefentry>
            for information on how to become DRM-Master and what the limitations
            are. Other DRM users can be authenticated to the DRM-Master via
            <citerefentry><refentrytitle>drmAuthMagic</refentrytitle><manvolnum>3</manvolnum></citerefentry>
            so they can perform buffer allocations and rendering.</para>
    </refsect2>

    <refsect2>
      <title>Mode-Setting</title>
      <para>Managing connected monitors and displays and changing the current
            modes is called <emphasis>Mode-Setting</emphasis>. This is
            restricted to the current DRM-Master. Historically, this was
            implemented in user-space, but new DRM drivers implement a kernel
            interface to perform mode-setting called
            <emphasis>Kernel Mode Setting</emphasis> (KMS). If your
            hardware-driver supports it, you can use the KMS API provided by
            DRM. This includes allocating framebuffers, selecting modes and
            managing CRTCs and encoders. See
            <citerefentry><refentrytitle>drm-kms</refentrytitle><manvolnum>7</manvolnum></citerefentry>
            for more.</para>
    </refsect2>

    <refsect2>
      <title>Memory Management</title>
      <para>The most sophisticated tasks for GPUs today is managing memory
            objects. Textures, framebuffers, command-buffers and all other kinds
            of commands for the GPU have to be stored in memory. The DRM driver
            takes care of managing all memory objects, flushing caches,
            synchronizing access and providing CPU access to GPU memory. All
            memory management is hardware driver dependent. However, two generic
            frameworks are available that are used by most DRM drivers. These
            are the <emphasis>Translation Table Manager</emphasis> (TTM) and the
            <emphasis>Graphics Execution Manager</emphasis> (GEM). They provide
            generic APIs to create, destroy and access buffers from user-space.
            However, there are still many differences between the drivers so
            driver-depedent code is still needed. Many helpers are provided in
            <emphasis>libgbm</emphasis> (Graphics Buffer Manager) from the
            <emphasis>mesa-project</emphasis>. For more information on DRM
            memory-management, see
            <citerefentry><refentrytitle>drm-memory</refentrytitle><manvolnum>7</manvolnum></citerefentry>.</para>
    </refsect2>
  </refsect1>

  <refsect1>
    <title>Reporting Bugs</title>
    <para>Bugs in this manual should be reported to
          http://bugs.freedesktop.org under the "Mesa" product, with "Other" or
          "libdrm" as the component.</para>
  </refsect1>

  <refsect1>
    <title>See Also</title>
    <para>
      <citerefentry><refentrytitle>drm-kms</refentrytitle><manvolnum>7</manvolnum></citerefentry>,
      <citerefentry><refentrytitle>drm-memory</refentrytitle><manvolnum>7</manvolnum></citerefentry>,
      <citerefentry><refentrytitle>drmSetMaster</refentrytitle><manvolnum>3</manvolnum></citerefentry>,
      <citerefentry><refentrytitle>drmAuthMagic</refentrytitle><manvolnum>3</manvolnum></citerefentry>,
      <citerefentry><refentrytitle>drmAvailable</refentrytitle><manvolnum>3</manvolnum></citerefentry>,
      <citerefentry><refentrytitle>drmOpen</refentrytitle><manvolnum>3</manvolnum></citerefentry>
    </para>
  </refsect1>
</refentry>