DirectX Architecture Resources - direct3d

Can anybody please please post links to DX Driver architecture which covers topics like block manager etc etc. Hell lot of google search but i am not satisfied with what i get from google. nvidia specific resources preferred.
MSDN also seems to focus on DX APIs only. It dont curse them as they don't control the drivers.

I'm not sure, but may be "A trip through the Graphics Pipeline 2011" will be useful for you...?
I believe, that some aspects of "D3D/OpenGL graphics pipelines as actually implemented by GPUs" can give you a hits of what to search to retrieve more actual information about drivers.

Here are some links that might help you understand DX driver architecture:
How do libraries such as DirectX relate to drivers?
Direct3D device driver development on Windows (A thread in GameDev Forum)
What is the Architecture behind DirectX?
DirectX FAQ on programmers Heaven
Windows driver API basics
WDM I/O Concepts
I hope that helped!

Related

Make an usb video grabber driver

I have buy an usb video grabber on ebay but I haven't received an official device, it's a fake, and this one is the only one fake not supported by Linux. I would like to write the linux driver, but I have no knowledge on driver dev. Where can I find tutorial for driver dev learning on linux?
The device is an easycap dc60++, identified as fushicai usbtv007. More details here : http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Easycap#Known_Easycap_devices
It works on win7, so I can easily sniff usb protocol.
Thanks you in advance
IMHO, the best way to learn how to develop drivers for the kernel is to take an existing driver (best if it's from mainline) that is similar to what you want and look at how they're doing it. For function references, head to your favourite LXR site and search it up.
You could look up Linux driver development on Google and find some tutorials but I wouldn't recommend it for anything other than to get started since they're likely to be outdated or use deprecated kernel APIs.
Otherwise, there's always libusb if you don't want to get into the world of kernel driver development.
Good luck.
I made an experimental userspace driver for this device:
https://github.com/memeruiz/usbtv007
Hopefully somebody (or me) will take this and make a proper kernel driver for it.
I've made a driver for the device in question (https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/6/10/381). There's a big space for improvement and I'd be very glad if you could get involved.
The following documentation is helpful:
Linux Device Driver, third edition, book.
PDFs: http://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/
epub: http://v3.sk/~lkundrak/ldd3/
Video4Linux2 API: http://lwn.net/Articles/203924/
Videobuf2 API: http://lwn.net/Articles/447435/
When it comes to a good example, have a look at the drivers/media/usb tree, particularly the stk1160 driver.
I didn't yet have a look at Federico Ruiz's libusb driver for the device, but it seems he mostly figured out the same things as I did about the hardware. I suggest you take a look at it though, as I'll certainly do.
Also, linux-media list is probably a better place to ask questions like this. I've got here mostly by accident and there certainly are much more capable people on the list.
Have a great day!

Writing Device Drivers for AIX...Suggestions

I would like to learn how to write device drivers for IBM AIX OS.
I wanted to know is there any way to do this?
Can I download AIX? any books or docs available on the same?
If not, then if I learn how to write drivers on FreeBSD/Linux will that knowledge help?
Please suggest me..
Thanks a lot in advance.
Marc
Writing drivers for other platforms like BSD or Linux helps but it also hurts.
AIX has a preemptible, page-able kernel which makes it really weird to write for. A thread, in a system call, can get preempted. This is unusual for kernels. Data structures in the kernel can be paged out. This is also unusual. The locking mechanisms are unusual as well.
As you can tell, finding info about AIX is rather hard. The pubs actually does have most things documented but finding it is rather challenging because IBM and AIX tends to use their own terms.
There is a fairly good book that was published years ago. You might find it on ebay or something about writing device drivers for AIX.
There are also partner programs that IBM has, google "Partner World", that try to help.
The other thing you will find (especially with the partner programs) is AIX is like the red-headed step child of IBM. The folks at partner world want to talk about Tivoli, Lotus, DB2, Rational, etc. and few will know much / anything about AIX. But they do have access to equipment, etc.
Its going to be a tough road to climb. I keep wondering, why you have decided to do this. The market for AIX driver writers is nil.
Anonymous disinterested help (posted as a guest!)
Found this rather obsolete book on AIX 4.1,
http://bio.gsi.de/DOCS/AIX/SC23-2593-00.pdf

Why is there no DirectX API for Linux?

Upon considering the driver side implementation for DirectX API on windows systems for modern video cards I was wondering why this implementation is not available on non-windows system, most notably linux.
Since there is an obvious absence of this functionality I can only assume there is a good reason which I am blind to, but in my primitive understanding I simply see the DirectX calls as no more than function entry points on the hardware device. And for the record I am not referring to a compatibility layer (most notably WINE, a project I am amazed by every single day) but a library making direct hardware calls.
Is it possible to create an open source version of directx? Would it be possible but obscenely difficult?
AFAIK, the DirectX contains 3 parts
Vendor driver (provide low level API defined by DX)
DirectX library (use low level API defined by DX to access hardware, provide DirectX API)
Software (use DirectX API, ex. game)
There are no driver providing the low level API defined by DX on linux, so even it is possible to provide the DirectX library, but it won't work without proper vendor driver, and I can't see if there is any vendor is going to create one for their hardware platform.
Why not just use OpenGL? It supports all the functionality that DirectX does. Do you have a specific reason to use DirectX? As for a reason, Microsoft made DirectX and I guess they didn't see any need to allow it to run on Linux.
You can run DirectX games in Linux using Wine. You can program XNA on Linux using MonoGame. But all of these use OpenGL to provide hardware-accelerated rendering. AFAIK, OpenGL has been (and probably will be) the only option on Linux for the foreseeable future.
Is it possible to write your own DirectX implementation? Sure - but it involves writing drivers, proprietary knowledge and probably too much cost for anyone to REALLY benefit from it.
EDIT: These days, DXVK is a very real and performant way to run DirectX applications on Linux.
DirectX is a suit of API's:
Direct3D (drawing 3D graphics)
DirectX Graphics Infrastructure (enumerating adapters and monitors and managing swap chains)
Direct2D (drawing 2D graphics)
DirectWrite (fonts)
DirectCompute (GPU Computing)
DirectSound3D (playback of 3D sounds)
DirectX Media (DirectAnimation for 2D/3D web animation, DirectShow for multimedia playback and streaming media, DirectX Transform for web interactivity, and Direct3D Retained Mode for higher level 3D graphics)
DirectX Diagnostics (tool for diagnosing and generating reports on components related to DirectX, such as audio, video, and input drivers)
DirectX Media Objects (support for streaming objects such as encoders, decoders, and effects)
DirectSetup (installation of DirectX components, and the detection of the current DirectX version)
DirectX components deprecated, but still supported
DirectDraw
DirectInput
DirectPlay
DirectSound
DirectMusic
As you can see many parts of the DirectX suit of API's would need to be rewritten with functionality for Drivers written for Linux. Also some parts of the DirectX suit are likely going to make calls to the Windows OS and that code would have to rewritten for a Linux machine without infringement of the copy-written parts of either DirectX or the Windows OS.
Yes you could write a open source API suit which does the same kind of thing as DirectX for Linux, however without a great knowledge of sound and graphic drivers/support by their manufactures for Linux, it would be a very hard task to do.
However if you question was more of a "Can I get/write something to be able to run games and programs made with DirectX to run on Linux?" in it's meaning, in short no due to more likely copyright infringement.
Your question is wrong in 2019. DXVK is an implementation of D3D11 and D3D10 implementation for Linux using Vulkan and Wine
Also mesa has native Direct3D 9 implementation but in my knowledge, no one uses it except wine
The work to create a port for DirectX would create the same problems as you encounter in WINE. It will never be the same as on Windows. Derived from that principle you would have to look into OpenGL and related multi-platform libraries.
At this very moment WINE would be your closest medium if you want to accomplish something with DirectX code you already have. Then again, I'm not sure in what manner Visual Studio or plain typing would get you closer yo a fluent environment. The WINE libraries aren't that far from native, but there always exists emulation, what is acceptable to a certain point in my honest opinion.
If I look at how superbly Final Fantasy XIV ran on full settings on my iMac (2011) I think it's not that bad to rely on WINE's implementation. The game exactly rendered as on Bootcamp (Windows) on my iMac.
If you really want to make work on this front you could try to ask WINE Devs at their forums or mailing lists how you could maybe use the implementation of their DirectX compatibility only and use that in your project. Where you maybe can call libraries instead of requesting DirectX through Windows-emulated system calls.
Edit: I fully agree with user956030's answer too.
DirectX is a propriety products designed for Microsoft targets, so for this to happen would be very unusual
There are two other pieces of software that come to mind, SDL and OpenGL
OpenGL provides the hardware alternative to DirectX, and SDL works with OpenGL to provide the software support you would expect from DirectX
Since 2020, Microsoft has been working to port DirectX 12 to WSL2, which is being done in this repository. In a mailist, Steve Pronovost commented that they might work to port this driver to Linux to have it running natively.
However, in order to do this, they would need to implement the driver on top of the kernel's DRM stack, which itself needs to be modified if they want to keep the driver similar to the Windows one and have related APIs.
There is some effort being done in the Mesa library as well, to support D3D12 within itself, the main purpose being to optimize server-sided GPU calculations that are heavily used in machine learning algorithms.
Even though this is great, it's unlikely that we will ever see any advantage running Windows games on Linux with that driver. The open source community would only have the upper ground if more games start supporting Vulkan, which is faster and better than DirectX, there had been experiments where using DXVK on Windows would be faster than DirectX 9 or even 11, such as the one mentioned here, but DXVK tends to be less reliable and more prone to errors and crashes.

Linux network driver port to ARM

I have a Linux network driver that was originally written for 2.4 kernel. It works perfect.
I want to port it to kernel 2.6.31 and then to ARM Linux with same kernel i.e. 2.6.31. I have actually done some minor changes to the driver so that it is able to compile under kernel 2.6.31 and it also loads and unloads without crashing. It also cross compiles for the ARM Linux. But I am unable to test it on ARM so far.
How do I check that the driver is fully compatible with the target kernel, and what considerations shall be made to make it compatible with ARM.
The driver is a virtual network device driver.
Thanks in advance.
Maybe you could use Qemu ( http://wiki.qemu.org/Main_Page) to emulate an ARM platform to be able to test your driver.
You cannot check the driver like that - you have to consider the API changes within 2.6.x series kernel. The changes are quite significant and the overall of the API's from the 2.4 series which is not currently in use.
I would suggest you to go here to the Amazon book store for this book in particular. The book is called 'Essential Linux Device Drivers', by Sreekrishnan Venkateswaran. A very well detailed explanation that will be your guidance in ensuring it works properly.
Since you mentioned the device driver is a network, presumably char device (You're not accessing it in blocks), well, the good news is that the 2.6.x series kernel APIs for the character devices are significantly easier and more centralized to focus on - in fact a lot of the framework is already in place in which the author of said book explains very clearly.
By the way, the book focusses on the latter 2.6.x series after 2.6.19, so this will help you clue in on what needs to be done to ensure your driver works.
You did not specify the ARM chipset you're targetting?
As for testing... well.. perhaps the best way to do this, this is dependant on how you answer the above question to you regarding ARM chipset - if its ARMv6, then perhaps, a cheap android handset that you can easily unlock and root, and pop the kernel in there and see what happens - sorry for sounding contrived but that's the best thing I can think of and that's what pops into my head, to enable you to test it out for ease of testing :)
PS: A lot of cheap ARMv6 handsets would have kernel 2.6.32 running Froyo if that's of any help!

Books to read on networking and microcontrollers?

I was recently elected programming team lead for my community college's engineering club. We're going to put a solar panel on a roof. The programming part involves
Controlling servos to adjust the orientation of the panel
Sending data on the electricity collected by the panel to a server (we haven't decided whether we want this to be via a wired or wireless connection.)
Although I know a fair amount about programming in general, I know next to nothing about networking or microcontrollers.
Can you recommend any books I can read to familiarize myself with these topics? Is there an obvious choice of programming language and library for either domain? Any linux man pages I should read? I'm actually not sure whether the computer we'll put on the roof will be running Linux or Windows. So I'd appreciate recommendations for both OS's.
Will Beej's guide to network programming
http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/
be useful, or is it only for internet applications and not local networks? Is there software that operates at a higher level than sockets that I should use instead?
If nothing else, give me some non-obvious keywords I can use to search on Google.
I'd look at the arduino platform, it's a very simple platform for building things exactly like this on top of it: http://arduino.cc
And from Wikipedia
Arduino is a physical computing platform based on a simple open hardware design for a single-board microcontroller, with embedded I/O support and a standard programming language.1 The Arduino programming language is based on Wiring and is essentially C/C++ (several simple transformations are performed before passing to avr-gcc).[2] The goal of the Arduino project is to make tools available that are accessible, low-cost, low capital investment, flexible and easy-to-use for artists and hobbyists. Particularly those who might not otherwise have access to more sophisticated controllers that require more complicated tools.[3]
because that ethernet is popular, so i suggest that design layer 2 as ethernet type.
for physical layer and wireless or wired, there're so many datasheet and specification samples and design guides which you could found at http://developer.intel.com and http://software.intel.com, both chips level or drivers level. enjoy that.

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