Implementation Of GPU Graphics Driver Software Under Linux

With the growth of Linux’s popularity with the graphics systems and the increasing fields of application for the embedded Graphics Processing Unit, the design and research of GPU graphics driver software under Linux has drawn more and more attention. Graphics driver software is one of the most important system software which contributes to taking full advantage of graphics hardware. Developing this driver software involves firmly not only specific GPU hardware but also many aspects of operating system and principles of rendering three-dimensional objects. However, the current main GPU hardware description documents and driver software source are hardly available, which is a huge obstacle to research and development of graphics driver software under Linux. Due to these problems above, the design and implementation of GPU graphics driver software under Linux has been studied in the paper. The main contributions are as follows:1. The current main GPU architectures and the status of their drivers are introduced. The process of three-dimensional graphics fixed rendering pipeline is studied.2. The procedure and module of driver development under Linux is studied. Linux graphics driver stack is described, including the Linux window system X Window, an implementation of OpenGL, Mesa 3D library and Linux kernel Direct Rendering Manager.3. By studying how to implement an OpenGL library, four-layered design of OpenGL library structure is proposed. The user space programs of GPU driver, GL and GLU libraries, are achieved, whose task is mainly to translate sequences of OpenGL standard functions into the GPU hardware commands.4. The mechanism and programming of Linux kernel driver module is studied. The kernel space program of GPU driver is implemented as a platform device driver model, whose primary function is to setup GPU, control its status and submit GPU commands to the command processor of GPU.5. Comprehensive and systematical test on GPU driver software is carried on the SoC prototype system based on FPGA, respectively, with test cases for every single function and classic OpenGL NeHe tutorial samples. The results show the almost same outputs with ones that are displayed under Microsoft Visual Studio and Mesa 3D library.