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A GART is used as a means of data exchange between the main memory and video memory through which buffers (i.e. paging/swapping) of textures, polygon meshes and other data are loaded, but can also be used to expand the amount of video memory available for systems with only integrated or shared graphics (i.e. no discrete or inbuilt graphics ...
When a user-space program needs a chunk of video memory (to store a framebuffer, texture or any other data required by the GPU [15]), it requests the allocation to the DRM driver using the GEM API. The DRM driver keeps track of the used video memory and is able to comply with the request if there is free memory available, returning a "handle ...
For 2D rendering, the DDX driver must also take into account the DRI clients using the same graphics device. the access to the video card or graphics adapter is regulated by a kernel component called the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM). [10] Both the X Server's DDX driver and each X client's DRI driver must use DRM to access the graphics hardware.
WDDM drivers allow video memory to be virtualized, [6] and video data to be paged out of video memory into system RAM. In case the video memory available turns out to be insufficient to store all the video data and textures, currently unused data is moved out to system RAM or to the disk. When the swapped out data is needed, it is fetched back.
Drivers without freely (and legally) -available source code are commonly known as binary drivers. Binary drivers used in the context of operating systems that are prone to ongoing development and change (such as Linux) create problems for end users and package maintainers. These problems, which affect system stability, security and performance ...
Much the way the system BIOS provides a set of functions that are used by software programs to access the system hardware, the video BIOS provides a set of video-related functions that are used by programs to access the video hardware as well as storing vendor-specific settings such as card name, clock frequencies, VRAM types & voltages.
Higher performance hardware such as graphics cards use DMA to access memory directly; in a virtual environment all memory addresses are re-mapped by the virtual machine software, which causes DMA devices to fail. The IOMMU handles this re-mapping, allowing the native device drivers to be used in a guest operating system.
Memory allocation is dynamic – each process gets as much memory as it requests. Active pages are transferred into main memory for fast access; inactive pages are pushed out to secondary storage to make room, as needed. When a single process starts consuming a large amount of memory, it usually occupies more and more of main memory, pushing ...