The State Of OpenGL 3.x in Mesa Core

[bridgman]

Anyway, I getting more skeptic about MESA future. Lots of promises from ATI on their drivers, lots of promises about Gallium3D... but time goes and only hopes are there. Little real results, the path seems too long for them and people are tired of waiting for it.

Excuse me, but exactly what are these promises you are talking about ?

We promised to write and release documentation and to fund some initial development effort to jump-start the process. AFAIK we are doing all that and more.

Nobody is making promises about Gallium3D as far as I know -- if they are I would like to see them as well.

[elanthis]

What desktop Linux needs is either a business model which will fund the required development effort -- which is probably going to require money coming from users

Where do I send the money?

I'd gladly pay $100/year to fund development. That's more than I would be paying Microsoft for an upgrade once every 4 years, even. $100/year is nothing if it meant having a fully-usable Linux desktop.

I still 6 months later get constant corruption on my R700-based desktop with the very latest kernel, mesa, drm... it's like nobody gives a shit about quality in Linux land. I'd much rather have a stable desktop than GL3 right now. I've been consistently spending more and more and more time in Windows 7 just because it actually works, not to mention works better in some ways, especially ease-of-use for when I just want to get shit done and not dick around for 15 minutes doing things the Linux way. If there were someone I could help fund to reverse this situation, I would. Promise. I used to buy the Red Hat releases when they come out, but Red Hat stopped selling consumer OSes. Ubuntu... I'm not sure where their money comes from, I've never seen them ask for a cent for anything. I don't have the time or the interest to contribute to most of the things in Linux land that don't work well or at all, though I do contribute to some areas that hit my fancy (none related to graphics). It's like I'm stuck using Free Software that can't actually get the job done or I'm stuck using proprietary software.

So yeah, if a measly $100/yr could make a difference, I'm all for it.

[bugmenot]

I'd also pay a few dollars. But most devs are hired by a company, e.g. AMD, Red Hat, Novell, Intel and they do ATM even more than they have to do AFAICS, for example in their free time. And other unpayed developers do as much as they can do in their free time anyway.

I would like to support the linux graphics ecosystem in general, but don't know how to do this, and also would like to support special features, like overscan support in free drivers, so that I can use free drivers to use my TV (connected over HDMI, and I cannot disable overscan in the TV). I don't know how much work it would be to implement overscan in the graphics driver, but there are projects like http://www.kickstarter.com/ where one can spend money on projects, which need a special amount of money. And if you want to support this special project, you say "Yes, I will pay X $, if there are enough other people, who want to support, too." And only if enough people would spend the money, it gets transferred.
I'd like to support, but don't know how.

[drag]

BTW Mesa OpenGL stack will still get used with Gallium3D drivers. It is not like Gallium3D is designed to replace Mesa or anything like that.. Gallium is dependent on Mesa if you ever want to have OpenGL support.

Maybe there is confusion going on in this thread?

Here is how it goes:

Xorg DDX = Device Dependent X. It's is X's own proprietary (as in their own special way, not closed source) way to do 2D driver. This provides EXA 2D acceleration.

Linux DRM = Linux Direct Rendering Manager. The Linux kernel's way to allow managed access to the hardware. This provides the DRI and/or DRI2 protocol to userland, which is a "Stable ABI" designed for graphics drivers. DDX does not use this interface and instead accesses the hardware on it's own.

DRI/DRI2 = The cross platform API in which userland graphics drivers can interact with the hardware through a kernel DRM.

Mesa = Open Source OpenGL implementation. They also provide DRI/DRI2-speaking 3D drivers.

Gallium3D = New driver model focusing on minimizing the amount of hardware specific code and is designed to support multiple APIs in the form of "state trackers".



Now... The long term goal is so that you can get rid of the need for DDX for 2D acceleration and a unique DRI driver for 3D. Instead you have a generic Xorg state tracker for 2D and a Mesa state tracker for 3D.

All the work going into things like kernel memory management, kms, mesa etc etc. is all still going to benefit Gallium drivers.

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Now as far as Intel....

The reason Intel is focusing on the current drivers is because users don't care about the APIs used in their drivers. Instead they want stability and featureness.

Right now they have finished making the transition away from having X access the hardware directly and instead is now using the kernel for memory management for UXA (EXA on top of kernel memory management), which required a buttload of other changes.

At the beginning of 2009 the drivers were at a low point because they were in a state of transition from old stuff to the newer stuff. Now they at the point were they are stabilizing and doing performance enhancements.

Gallium is still too far off for Intel to care about going through another transition period just yet. Once the current drivers reach a satisfactory state were they can just sit and be used for a year or two then that is when the focus will again switch to Gallium.


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The open source ATI drivers are just now getting to about the same point that Intel's were in 2009.

They are getting usable and they are now supporting the hardware and feature level needed by most _desktop_ type activities, but are going to be buggy and irritating to deal with.

But I think that ATI will transition faster then Intel due to the fact that only some of Intel's video hardware supports modern feature while pretty much all ATI hardware does. Also ATI users are more performance and feature oriented so they should end up putting more work into testing and helping out the developers. Especially when Gallium starts entering the picture in a big way.. because at that point it should be at least _possible_ to support the same level of features with OSS that are currently only available for proprietary Nvidia driver users.

Then at that point OSS drivers should start becoming a real viable alternative for people _needing_ more then just 3D desktop support.

[not.sure]

Ironically, nouveau is developed exclusively toward Gallum3D...

[chithanh]

No, not exclusively. GeForce4 and earlier fixed-function hardware will only have a classic Mesa driver called nouveau_vieux.