Mesa / Gallium3D Branch Happenings

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa / Gallium3D Branch Happenings

Not only are Mesa developers -- those at VMware and within the open-source community -- busy at work on producing new state trackers (such as for OpenCL and OpenGL 3.1/3.2 support) and actual hardware drivers (or virtual drivers), but the core Gallium3D architecture and API continues to be revised as well. Over the past few days there have been some new Gallium3D branches that have come about and others that are getting ready to be merged to master, or enter the mainline Mesa code-base. Just this morning the Gallium3D pipe-format-simplify branch was opened up by VMware, which cleans up the pipe format header file...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=Nzc4MQ

[HokTar]

Does this mean that we will be able to use our (Ati) GPUs with Gallium3D in Mesa 7.8? With proper power management, xv, opengl 2, etc. I guess that hardware video decoding, opengl 3.x and opencl will come later.

[Pfanne]

Does this mean that we will be able to use our (Ati) GPUs with Gallium3D in Mesa 7.8?

nope.
maybe we will see support for r300, but nothing else.

[madman2k]

Does this mean that we will be able to use our (Ati) GPUs with Gallium3D in Mesa 7.8? With proper power management, xv, opengl 2, etc. I guess that hardware video decoding, opengl 3.x and opencl will come later.

power management does not depend on gallium3d. see: http://www.rojtberg.net/271/4-years-later/

[Hephasteus]

Libdrm just pushed to distribute today on fedora 12.
It's like this whole gallium 3d thing is happening very quickly.

[HokTar]

power management does not depend on gallium3d. see: http://www.rojtberg.net/271/4-years-later/

I know that, I was just curious if it would work practically out of the box with Gallium3D? (Since it will be in the kernel, so I guess it should not depend on anything else, just the IRQs and of course needs kms.)

By the way, is there an ETA, or roadmap, or anything when given features should be done? For example would it be a feasible guess to say that we will have this in Lucid+1?
I'm aware of the radeonwiki and the galliumstatus pages, but I'd like to ask what is still needed to have a working system based on G3D? I mean apart from the ddx drivers what else is necessary?

[cb88]

yeah I just installed mesa-git on archlinux

most games are running without crashing in the limited testing I just did there are texture issues in most games except openarena which i think there still might be a problem or too

compiz works fine... opengl supported verson is 1.5 shaders are apparently running on the cpu

this is an r620 aka radeon 4200 I don't see why gallium3d wounldn't be able to surpass catalyst im most repects by mesa 7.8 I am already rather impressed with what they have so far

[d2kx]

yeah I just installed mesa-git on archlinux

most games are running without crashing in the limited testing I just did there are texture issues in most games except openarena which i think there still might be a problem or too

compiz works fine... opengl supported verson is 1.5 shaders are apparently running on the cpu

this is an r620 aka radeon 4200 I don't see why gallium3d wounldn't be able to surpass catalyst im most repects by mesa 7.8 I am already rather impressed with what they have so far

There's no r600 gallium3d driver yet. Mesa 7.8 just got a lot of smaller r600 commits today, so maybe checkout and rebuild it and see if it fixes your problems. You can also try experimental GLSL support today but don't expect it to run stable just yet.

[Xheyther]

Is there a software rendering driver usable at this time ? The Gallium 3D documentation is quite obscure on that point.
all it tells is :

The softpipe driver is a software implementation of the Gallium3D interface.

It will be used as a reference implementation and as a fallback driver when a hardware driver isn't available. The softpipe driver will make extensive use of run-time code generation to efficiently execute vertex, fragment and rasterization operations.

So as far I understand, you can use Gallium 3D with any graphic card and if the driver don't support a feature the software rendering pipe will take care of it. That's it ?

[smitty3268]

Is there a software rendering driver usable at this time ? The Gallium 3D documentation is quite obscure on that point.
all it tells is :



So as far I understand, you can use Gallium 3D with any graphic card and if the driver don't support a feature the software rendering pipe will take care of it. That's it ?

I don't think that's quite accurate. You have to use either the software rendering (softpipe driver) or use a hardware accelerated driver. The other drivers won't automatically fall back to using software rendering for missing features unless that's been specifically added into the driver by the devs. What the quote above is saying is that if you have a card without a gallium driver (like r100 or r800) then you can still use software accelerated 3D.