What Was Decided With S3TC & Floating Points For Mesa

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Originally Posted by pvtcupcakes

The S3TC library doesn't have to be present at compile time. You can compile it after compiling Mesa, and Mesa dynamically loads it somehow. It's linked at runtime rather than compile time. I think they use dlopen() ? It has a man page that you can read up on if you're interested.

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This is correct. The dlopen(<libname>) function opens a shared library at run-time, and then you use the dlsym() function to get pointers to named functions within that library. Then you just store a reference to the function pointer and call that whenever you need to do S3TC-related work. Check out <dlfcn.h> and the dlopen/dlsym/dlclose man pages.

Think of the S3TC library as a plugin which is loaded if it's present, but if the Mesa library doesn't find it, or can't load it, it's no big deal.

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Originally Posted by darkbasic

Obviously the opposite, what else?
Also, don't feel offended if someone corrects you when you write yourself that you may be wrong...

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I don't mind being corrected, saying "Wrong" isn't a correction though

Thanks for the dlopen() info the reason I was confused was one of the previous articles comments mentioned having to rebuild mesa

Maybe I just didn't read enough of the discussion, but has anyone said anything against putting this stuff behind the --enable-patented configure option and why not?

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Maybe I just didn't read enough of the discussion, but has anyone said anything against putting this stuff behind the --enable-patented configure option and why not?

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I thought the article did a reasonably good job. The floating point work apparently causes performance regressions, and s3tc is already more convenient as an optional shared object.

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Originally Posted by 89c51

the bigger problem is that an open specification decided to use patented stuff IMO

i don't know however if it could be done in another way :confused:

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"Open" means that the specification is available to read and study free of royalty; nothing else. You are confusing "open specifications" with "open implementations."

And no, it couldn't have been done any other way. There is an actual _reason_ why people want OpenGL 3 support including all of its mandatory features; you realize this, right? Floating point textures are _essential_ for many modern rendering techniques. You cannot do them without floating point textures and render buffers. Period.

Without floating point textures, I really don't give a shit what other OpenGL 3/4 features Mesa gains. It's useless for modern AAA game engines until there is proper floating point support. Everything else modern games do is totally possible on OpenGL 2/DirectX 9. Geometry shaders, hardware tessellation, and so on are nice and useful but are not as essential.

The only other thing that the newer OpenGL versions bring with them that is essential is instanced rendering (which is already available as an extension in Mesa, so that's all good) and newer versions of GLSL that are ever so slightly less retarded than the original GLSL. (But GLSL still sucks. Nobody serious is using it directly; I've yet to meet anyone who didn't vastly prefer HLSL or Cg, and Cg only when portability is essential -- that's how bad GLSL is. For the simple graphics stuff I do it's fine, but the graphics pros I work with uniformly despise it, and the OpenGL API in general. That includes the ones who learned OpenGL before DirectX, I might note, so don't claim it's bias from familiarity. Mostly the GLSL complains all revolve around how hard it is to build advanced runtime effects composition layers, which was actually literally impossible to do right until GLSL 4.10/3.30, and even with those it's still way harder to get right than with HLSL/Cg.).

@elanthis

I probably used the wrong word there. In other words i would prefer to have something that is free for everyone to implement, read, set it on fire or shove it up his bottom if he likes to. But from your post i come to the conclusion that this would be impossible or very difficult.

As for the rest of your post i am not a Computer engineer and have no idea about the limitations of the GLSL or the OpenGL API. Write a hate/rage mail to Kronos. :D

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Originally Posted by »John«

If you find anything in the current legislation outrageous, stupid or both, simply start urging your representative to change that and don't forget to be persistent, because they just can't ignore the flood of mail and phone calls forever.

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They sure can ignore it, especially when corporations and lobbyists are stuffing cash into their pockets. I think a lot of Americans have become so jaded and cynical that they're hopeless about their government. I find a lot of policies insanely stupid (corporate welfare/bailouts, our health system, the War on Citizens aka the War on Drugs, etc.) I'm not one to advocate violence and revolution, but it may be one of the only effective tools we have.

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Originally Posted by DanL

They sure can ignore it, especially when corporations and lobbyists are stuffing cash into their pockets. I think a lot of Americans have become so jaded and cynical that they're hopeless about their government. I find a lot of policies insanely stupid (corporate welfare/bailouts, our health system, the War on Citizens aka the War on Drugs, etc.) I'm not one to advocate violence and revolution, but it may be one of the only effective tools we have.

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The problem we have in our country is that 'Big Government' depends on 'Big Corporations' and visa versa. Without the direct intervention of the government into capitalistic markets the major corporations couldn't survive. They would buckle under their own weight and bureaucracy.

Small/medium businesses are intensely competitive and in a open market multiple smaller players would feed off of major corporations like sharks on a whale carcass.

Major corporations know this. They see what happened with Linux versus SCO Unix, SGI Irix, IBM AIX, HP-UX, Sun Solaris, etc etc. The see what happened with Android versus Microsoft Mobile... they know this, they understand this and they aim to use patents to prevent and control who is allowed to make software and hardware that is competitive with them.

Can't afford the patents? Then you can't afford to compete. And that is exactly how they want it.

It's the same thing with DRM. It has much less to do with piracy then it has to do with who is allowed to make compatible hardware and software. It was never about piracy. It's about _control_. Control of the markets, control of who is allowed to compete with them. It's a instrument to protect industrial cabals and it 100% depends on the government to even have a chance of working. Without government and their guns then it's a house of cards.

Unless you able to pay their fees, join their organizations, agree to their limitations, and implement their designs then they use the government as a weapon against you to prevent you from supplanting their supply chains in addition making cheaper open devices that they don't control.

Everything that you have been told about 'IP' and the purpose of DRM by the media and government institutions is a lie. It's bullshit created by the people that benefit most from the controls to trick the people into volunteering to be victims of those controls.

So basically no real objections have been forwarded and everyone is just waiting for someone else to push it to master? Seriously, if someone did that, would anyone really back it out or is there just a lot of paranoia flying about for no real good reason?

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Originally Posted by Wyatt

So basically no real objections have been forwarded and everyone is just waiting for someone else to push it to master? Seriously, if someone did that, would anyone really back it out or is there just a lot of paranoia flying about for no real good reason?

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So, there were some issues with the way the software rendering code works, but legally speaking the go ahead was given to merge that code. Marek responded that he didn't care about the software renderers and wasn't going to touch that code, and no one else seems to care much about it either, judging from the lack of people looking into merging that.

No one has publicly come out against merging the hardware support, but apparently it sounds like there was a lot of negative reactions to it in private. I think if anyone merged it, they'd get yelled at and it would just come right back out.

So we're basically where we were when this whole thing started. Nowhere. And with no one even publicly saying why.