Re: useful ram on voodoo(2) cards?
Perry Harrington (pedward@sun4.apsoft.com)
Mon, 14 Dec 1998 10:09:01 -0800 (PST)
>
> Folks,
>
> Strange thoughts which I'd be grateful if someone could clear up for me:
>
> a) is the 8/12Mb of ram on a voodoo/voodoo2 card read/write-able? [I'd
> guess it should be writeable, given the card's function - but is it
> readable?]
>
> b) If the answer to a) is 'yes'. Would it be possible to write a driver
> which provided a /dev/voodooram file and permitted people to do:
>
> mkswap /dev/voodooram
> swapon /dev/voodooram
>
> [Such a driver would presumably have to prevent simultaneous access to the
> card for graphics purposes or we would have some funky displays whilst the
> machine hosed itself.]
On the Banshee, the entire 16MB is accessible via the /dev/fb0 device when
Vesa framebuffer is used.
>
> And a subsidary question: given a), is this idea insufficiently ambitious
> and could/should such RAM be usable as real system memory, not just fast
> swap?
Fast swap. You're going over the PCI bus, and that's 33Mhz. Your maing memory
bus is usually 60MHz+.
>
> regards,
>
> jb
>
--Perry
--
Perry Harrington Linux rules all OSes. APSoft ()
email: perry@apsoft.com Think Blue. /\
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