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Brief technical note on the NV1
-------------------------------

This document attempts to explain some of the technical features of the NV1.

Central to the chip is the concept that user-space programs should be allowed 
to have direct access to the chip. To enable this, the chip supports the 
concepts of "channels". Each application that wants to draw to screen is 
given a channel which allows it to perform graphics operations by writing to 
specified locations. Each channel is a 64K region of memory mapped registers,
divided into 8 identical subchannels. The NV1 supports 128 channels in total.

Each channel can be mapped to a specific area of the screen. All coordinates
supplied by the application are relative to this, the application doesn't
actually know where on the screen it's window is mapped. The chip also
supports clipping of this region, with multiple clip regions. If the number of
clip regions is exceeded then the object has to be drawn multiple times,
changing the clip regions for each invocation to ensure the correct clipping
behaviour.

Another feature of the chip is that all drawing is done via objects. For
example, if I want to draw a rectangle, I create a rectangle object. Each
object is given a unique 32 bit id. To actually draw a rectangle, I would load
the rectangle object id into the subchannel, and then write the
coordinates. The chip will add these coordinates to the channel's window offset
to get the real screen coordinates, handle clipping, and then finally draw the
rectangle.

Each object has data associated with it, which specifies how to configure 
the graphics hardware for that operation. The hardware has a hash table to 
perform look up of objects. If you load a different object into the subchannel 
then the hardware will look at the hash table for that id number and load the 
associated data for that object into the graphics hardware.

Software is needed to control this functionality. If the subchannel is loaded 
with an object that isn't in the hash table, an interrupt is raised.
Software will be expected to load the appropriate object into the hash 
table and restart the drawing operation.

Also, if multiple channels are drawing at the same time, the hardware will 
multiplex between them. An interrupt will be raised when a context switch is 
needed and the software will be expected to load the state for the channel to 
be swapped to and restart drawing.

In the case of XFree86, since the driver cannot handle interrupts as it 
is not part of the kernel, we have to be extremely careful not to raise an 
interrupt, as the chip will not do anything until the interrupt is dealt 
with. It also means that we can only ever use one channel, and cannot 
do any operations which require DMA such as host memory to screen blits, 
the 3D texture mapping, or any of the sound functionality. If these features 
are to be supported the driver will need to be moved into the kernel.

For more details, download Nvidia's NVlib SDK.



/* $XFree86: xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/drivers/nv/README.tech,v 1.2 1997/03/23 09:01:36 hohndel Exp $ */