Background:
Graphic devices are accessed through ranges in I/O or memory space. While most
modern devices allow relocation of such ranges, some "Legacy" VGA devices
implemented on PCI will typically have the same "hard-decoded" addresses as
they did on ISA. For more details see "PCI Bus Binding to IEEE Std 1275-1994
Standard for Boot (Initialization Configuration) Firmware Revision 2.1"
Section 7, Legacy Devices.
The Resource Access Control (RAC) module inside the X server currently does
the task of arbitration when more than one legacy device co-exists on the same
machine. But the problem happens when these devices are trying to be accessed
by different userspace clients (e.g. two server in parallel). Their address
assignments conflict. Therefore an arbitration scheme _outside_ of the X
server is needed to control the sharing of these resources. This document
introduces the operation of the VGA arbiter implemented for Linux kernel.
Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Signed-off-by: Tiago Vignatti <tiago.vignatti@nokia.com>
Signed-off-by: Dave Airlie <airlied@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@virtuousgeek.org>
Benjamin Herrenschmidt