How difficult would it be to create a call gate on the 920 which can process some system calls for the 940? Obviously things such as mmap would need to be simulated or disallowed because the hardware isn't there to make it effective, and process migration is probably out of the question, but many things (file access, generic pipes, etc) seem easy, and would be very useful.
Imagine if a renderer could load and intelligently cache graphics on the fly, without the 920 program (which tries not to deal with the specifics of which graphics are showing) needing to do anything special. If the 940 can anticipate textures that are almost being drawn, then preloading could be done, and loading jitter would be minimal.
Essentially, there would be a host process (or interrupt handler in more sophisticated design) on the 920 that serves as a representative of the 940 to linux. I assume that the 940 can be made to emulate the software interrupt that linux uses so that few software changes are needed to a 940 program.
If you look at multiprocessing design, it can be a big efficiency boost to allow requests to flow in both directions, but a debugging nightmare if not properly implemented.
Any thoughts or volunteers?
Imagine if a renderer could load and intelligently cache graphics on the fly, without the 920 program (which tries not to deal with the specifics of which graphics are showing) needing to do anything special. If the 940 can anticipate textures that are almost being drawn, then preloading could be done, and loading jitter would be minimal.
Essentially, there would be a host process (or interrupt handler in more sophisticated design) on the 920 that serves as a representative of the 940 to linux. I assume that the 940 can be made to emulate the software interrupt that linux uses so that few software changes are needed to a 940 program.
If you look at multiprocessing design, it can be a big efficiency boost to allow requests to flow in both directions, but a debugging nightmare if not properly implemented.
Any thoughts or volunteers?