X-Video, EXA Coming Atop Gallium3D

[phoronix]

Phoronix: X-Video, EXA Coming Atop Gallium3D

The Gallium3D driver infrastructure has been about writing a graphics processor driver that is more manageable and efficient by allowing state trackers (that provide features like OpenGL ES and OpenVG support) to be run on any driver that implements this unified API, complete with hardware acceleration. As implied by its name, Gallium3D was started with 3D graphics in mind, but this infrastructure is also working out for non-3D-specific state trackers, like supporting OpenCL...

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

[bugmenot]

Sounds good, should finally provide usable OSS drivers to people running on ATI hardware.

[krazy]

Excellent news - thanks to all involved!

[Threedays]

Sounds so good. Thanks guys for the work!

[jery]

Does someone have an estimated date for Gallium3D to be integrated in ATI OSS driver ?

[Pfanne]

Does someone have an estimated date for Gallium3D to be integrated in ATI OSS driver ?

there is no real date, but i can point you to the questions bridgman answered me just yesterday

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showt...t=18818&page=2

[MU_Engineer]

Sounds good, should finally provide usable OSS drivers to people running on ATI hardware.

The current Xorg radeon driver plus a 2.6.30 kernel works very well on R580 and older ATi GPUs. I have to say I am very pleased at how my x1900GT works with the OSS drivers.

[nanonyme]

The current Xorg radeon driver plus a 2.6.30 kernel works very well on R580 and older ATi GPUs. I have to say I am very pleased at how my x1900GT works with the OSS drivers.

Yeah, although without Gallium you're likely not going to get OpenGL versions newer than 1.5.
The significance of this as far as I know seems to be though that if/when the Gallium xorg state tracker will be usable and KMS matures, there will no longer be a need for xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd since the xorg state tracker pretty much *is* an X display driver.

[drag]

Yes. This sort of thing is needed to remove X from dealing with hardware. Ultimately you should be able to access all acceleration features without X... That is X becomes just another application.

Right now with most systems X.org server is out there accessing PCI devices and fiddling around with your hardware outside of the control of the Linux kernel. This is bad, mmmkay?

Also Gallium should provide much needed consistency between drivers. That is when currently using Linux the APIs and features that drivers support vary widely between devices. Some devices work best with XAA. Some devices only support OpenGL 1.2 and such while proprietary drivers can provide up to the latest OpenGL standards. That sort of thing. With Gallium everything should be supported across the board in a much more even fashion making it much easier and cheaper to develop games and do other multimedia stuff for Linux.

Very cool and Very needed.