OpenCL, OpenGL 3.1 State Trackers "Hopefully Soon"

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OpenCL, OpenGL 3.1 State Trackers "Hopefully Soon"

Yesterday afternoon there were two new Gallium3D state trackers released by VMware / Tungsten Graphics for OpenGL ES 1.1 and ES 2.0 support. With these new state trackers there is now OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 acceleration for any graphics hardware that has a Gallium3D driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzI3NQ

[d2kx]

Hopefully the GEM/KMS/DRI2 refresh for radeon is done soon, because it feels like there has been little progress since half a year or so even though I know I'm wrong, so that the developers can finally concentrate on a Gallium3D driver.

[bridgman]

It's just a big, wrenching transition unfortunately. The transition from non-mm to kms/mm looks like it was roughly two years start to finish for Intel parts (it's not finished yet); hopefully a bit less for radeon because it can leverage some of the work done before.

Moving the entire graphics stack onto a common memory manager is a big task; I don't think many folks realize how big. In principle memory managers are simple; in practice you need a lot of heuristics and client hints to get decent performance, which in turn means multiple optimizing passes across the entire driver stack. We're talking tens of man-years here, not a couple of developers for six months even though those developers *are* really smart.

[Louise]

It is just incredible that such a complicated project can be done, by so many people!

Why is VMware mentioned in the article? Are they pro Linux? I would expect them to not have interest in open source, besides their own kernel modules.

[Kano]

Maybe think about who owns Tungsten Graphics

[bridgman]

Yep; Tungsten Graphics, ie most of the people behind Mesa, DRI, Gallium3D, TTM, and a bunch of other cool things, is now part of VMWare.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=NjkyNw

[Louise]

Maybe think about who owns Tungsten Graphics

Ahhh. Good point

From their website:

Open source graphics technology development will continue as part of VMware's engineering team.

What does that mean? Will vmWare kill Tungsten Graphics, and just use their developers for vmWare?

[Louise]

Yep; Tungsten Graphics, ie most of the people behind Mesa, DRI, Gallium3D, TTM, and a bunch of other cool things, is now part of VMWare.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=NjkyNw

I have completely over looked that article

Just checked Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium3D

the link at the right for "Tungsten Graphics" doesn't exist...

Why would vmWare buy Tungsten Graphics? Is it likely that their reason is they want to improve 2D/3D performance in vmWare? And are Tungsten Graphics developers the only ones that can do that???

[deanjo]

Why would vmWare buy Tungsten Graphics?

Sometimes it's cheaper to buy a solution that is already in development then to create a solution from scratch and worry about violating it's patents and such.

Is it likely that their reason is they want to improve 2D/3D performance in vmWare?

Without a doubt.

And are Tungsten Graphics developers the only ones that can do that???

They are far from being the only ones capable but again it's sometimes cheaper to buy the patents and copywrite you need then to workaround them.

[remm]

They bought them a while ago now, so there does not seem to be any impact on the Gallium development.

Beyond that, I don't know either the reason for the acquisition. Maybe it is for 3D virtualization but that seems odd to me (besides running Windows games, I don't see the benefit, so making real money from that seems difficult).

Without a doubt.

Well, the money is mostly in the server virtualization space. Sure you can make some amount of money on desktop virt too, but it's comparatively small. Vmware cannot expect any growth out of that.