Adding EXA support to your X.Org video driver
---------------------------------------------
EXA (for EXcellent Architecture or Ex-kaa aXeleration Architecture or
whatever) aims to extend the life of the venerable XFree86 video drivers by
introducing a new set of acceleration hooks that efficiently accelerate the X
Render extension, including solid fills, blits within screen memory and to and
from system memory, and Porter-Duff compositing and transform operations.

Configuration
-------------
A new config file option, AccelMethod, should be added to your driver, to allow
the user to select between the EXA and XAA acceleration APIs.

Some drivers implement a per-instance useEXA flag to track whether EXA is
active or not.  It can be helpful to also conditionalize XAA support with an
ifdef so that it can easily be turned off/removed in the future.

Setting the flag and checking for AccelMethod can be done in the driver's
Options parsing routine.

Loading EXA
------------
EXA drivers in the XFree86 DDX should use the loadable module loader to load
the EXA core.  Careful versioning allows the EXA API to be extended without
breaking the ABI for older versions of drivers.  Example code for loading EXA:

static const char *exaSymbols[] = {
    "exaDriverAlloc",
    "exaDriverInit",
    "exaDriverFini",
    "exaOffscreenAlloc",
    "exaOffscreenFree",
    "exaGetPixmapOffset",
    "exaGetPixmapPitch",
    "exaGetPixmapSize",
    "exaMarkSync",
    "exaWaitSync",
    NULL
};

	if (info->useEXA) {
	    info->exaReq.majorversion = 2;
	    info->exaReq.minorversion = 0;

	    if (!LoadSubModule(pScrn->module, "exa", NULL, NULL, NULL,
			       &info->exaReq, &errmaj, &errmin)) {
		LoaderErrorMsg(NULL, "exa", errmaj, errmin);
		return FALSE;
	    }
	    xf86LoaderReqSymLists(exaSymbols, NULL);
	}

EXA is then initialized using exaDriverAlloc and exaDriverInit.  See doxygen
documentation for getting started there.

Further documentation
------------
The EXA driver interface and public API is documented using doxygen in
xserver/xorg/exa/.  To build the documentation, run:
  doxygen -g
  doxygen Doxyfile
The resulting documentation will appear an html/index.html under the current
directory.

EXA initialization
------------------
Your driver's AccelInit routine must initialize an ExaDriverRec structure if
EXA support is enabled, with appropriate error handling (i.e.  NoAccel and
NoXvideo should be set to true if EXA fails to initialize for whatever
reason).

The AccelInit routine also needs to make sure that there's enough offscreen
memory for certain operations to function, like Xvideo, which should advertise
a maximum size no larger than can be dealt with given the amount of offscreen
memory available.

EXA and Xv
----------
Video support becomes easier with EXA since AllocateFBMemory can use
exaOffscreenAlloc directly, freeing a previous area if necessary and
allocating a new one.  Likewise, FreeFBMemory can call exaOffscreenFree.

EXA teardown
------------
At screen close time, EXA drivers should call exaDriverFini with their screen
pointer, free their EXADriver structure, and do any other necessary teardown.

EXA misc.
---------
In many drivers, DGA support will need to be changed to be aware of the new
EXA support.

Send updates and corrections to Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@virtuousgeek.org> or
just check them in if you have permission.