xenocara/lib/libdrm/man/drm.7

.\" automatically generated with docbook2mdoc drm.xml
.Dd September 2012
.Dt DRM 7
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm drm
.Nd Direct Rendering Manager
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.Fd #include <xf86drm.h>
.Sh DESCRIPTION
The
.Em Direct Rendering Manager
(DRM) is a framework
to manage
.Em Graphics Processing Units
(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.
.Pp
In earlier days, the kernel framework was solely used to provide raw
hardware access to privileged 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
.Xr ioctl 2
commands on the DRM character device.
The
.Em libdrm
library provides wrappers for these system-calls and many helpers to
simplify the API.
.Pp
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
.Pa /dev/drm0
and can be accessed with
.Xr open 2
and
.Xr close 2 .
However, it still depends on the graphics driver which interfaces are
available on these devices.
If an interface is not available, the
syscalls will fail with
.Ql EINVAL .
.Ss Authentication
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
.Xr drmSetMaster 3
for information on how to become DRM-Master and what the limitations
are.
Other DRM users can be authenticated to the DRM-Master via
.Xr drmAuthMagic 3
so they can perform buffer allocations and rendering.
.Ss Mode-Setting
Managing connected monitors and displays and changing the current
modes is called
.Em Mode-Setting .
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
.Em Kernel Mode Setting
(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
.Xr drm-kms 7
for more.
.Ss Memory Management
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
.Em Translation Table Manager
(TTM) and the
.Em Graphics Execution Manager
(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
.Em libgbm
(Graphics Buffer Manager) from the
.Em mesa-project .
For more information on DRM
memory-management, see
.Xr drm-memory 7 .
.Sh REPORTING BUGS
Bugs in this manual should be reported to
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=DRI&component=libdrm
under the "DRI" product, component "libdrm"
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr drm-kms 7 ,
.Xr drm-memory 7 ,
.Xr drmSetMaster 3 ,
.Xr drmAuthMagic 3 ,
.Xr drmAvailable 3 ,
.Xr drmOpen 3
.Sh AUTHORS
.An -nosplit
.Sy Direct Rendering Manager
.Pp
.Sy libdrm
.An -split
Developer:
.An David Herrmann Aq Mt dh.herrmann@googlemail.com