EXA requirements (was: Re: Improved memory detection for cgsix)

Le jeu. 3 mars 2022 à 19:26, Michael <[email protected]> a écrit :
> EXA more or less depends on being able to address VRAM by offset +
> coordinates with arbitrary pitch, so off-screen pixmaps can be neatly
> treated as simple memory ranges.

Fully arbitrary, or can it work with some required level of roundings?
Unaligned accesses are problematic for most HW. So a stride of 16x8-bits
pixels or 4x32-bits pixels (or integer multiple of) is easy to implement
with a 128-bits memory controller, but 15x8 or 17x8 or 3x32 aren't.
I'm thinking of ways to implement a vector engine that could do arbitrary
copy, but it's not easy.
(the VexRiscv core I currently use can do arbitrary 32-bits, but that
versatility comes at a cost in terms of performance, so I want to address
the memory controller directly).

> If your hw can't do that, off-screen memory is mostly a cache for
> frequently used pixmaps.

Well that's the benefit of rolling your own hardware in a FPGA - you can
adapt it to the needed requirements :-)

Thanks & cordially,

-- 
Romain Dolbeau