On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 11:58 AM, Robert Huff <roberthuff@rcn.com> wrote:
quoted text
>
> Robert Noland writes:
>
>>  >    The alternative - which sounds seductive but may have its own
>>  > issues - would be to fill the Nvidia requests and let them write and
>>  > maintain the code.  Again, worthy project (which might have
>>  > collateral benefits).  Again, a lot of work.  And an even more
>>  > esoteric skill-set.
>>
>>  The features that Nvidia has requested are fairly reasonable and
>>  could be used in the open source drivers as well.
>
>        Question: would anything _other_ than graphics cards find these
> features useful?

    Yes, a large number of devices with large memory requirements or
that pump a lot of data through their buses would benefit from these
changes (large disk mmap, USB, ? Firewire devices like cameras, etc).
Large scale networking with routers and switches would also gain a lot
from this work, especially when dealing with porting apps like IOS on
Cisco products and JunOS on Juniper products to FreeBSD as they
sometimes allocate large amounts of memory for storing spanning trees,
routing lookup tables, and a number of other data structures.
    Graphics devices are still the greatest consumer of memory chunks
though, and that's why graphics devices are the largest beneficiary
group for this capability. Networking comes in a close second.
HTH,
-Garrett
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