New EGL Gallium3D State Tracker Pushed

[phoronix]

Phoronix: New EGL Gallium3D State Tracker Pushed

For the past few months there has been a developer, Chia-I Wu, working to bring the Mesa 3D stack to Android netbooks. Chia-I has worked to improve the OpenGL ES support in Mesa, wrote an Android EGL driver, Mesa OpenGL ES/EGL support outside of an X Server, and various other areas of interest...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=Nzg3NQ

[HokTar]

Kudos!

So, how far are we from being able to test Gallium3D? I mean something like a "usable beta"

By the way, what else is going to be implemented in "simple" mesa and what will be gallium-only from the point of view of OSS graphics drivers? In radeon I think opengl 3.x will only happen with the gallium drivers, opencl definitely.
So, what else is missing now from the regular radeon drivers besides power management?

Are there any plans for some edge-smoothing? Or is it something that should be done by the application through e.g. opengl?

Well, I've asked many questions, but I hope some people (or a certain gentleman) will answer them.

Thanks for your hard work! All of you!

[rohcQaH]

If you just need beta quality, the proper timeframe for testing G3D would be "months ago". VMWare already released a G3D driver for use in virtual machines.
It all depends on the hardware you're using though. The HW drivers for actual hardware are all somewhat experimental. As far as I know, r300 is your best bet.
And then there hasn't been widespread testing of G3D code, so bugs may creep up anytime and anywhere.


Hw accelerated video decoding is something else that'll wait for G3D.

[Jonno]

So, how far are we from being able to test Gallium3D? I mean something like a "usable beta"

It all depends on your hardware. For softpipe (software rendering) the first usable beta was Mesa 7.6, released September 2009. For ATI r300-r500, nVidia nv50 and Svga II (WMWare virtual machines) it was 7.7, released December 2009. For nVidea nv40 it will likely be 7.8, while for AMD r600-r800, nVidia nv30, and Intel hw you might have to wait for 7.9.

ATI r100-r200 and nVidia nv04-nv20 will likely never get Gallium3D support. For ATI r100-r200 this is no problem, as the classic mesa driver supports everyting the hw supports.

By the way, what else is going to be implemented in "simple" mesa and what will be gallium-only from the point of view of OSS graphics drivers?

Again, depends on hardware. For Intel hw, mostly everything supported by current hardware should appear in classic mesa, while for nVidia hw, nothing will be supported by classic mesa. For ATI/AMD, the only additional (not yet supported) feature to be suported by classic mesa is OpenGL 2.1, as well as bug-fixes ofcourse. The rest (OpenGL 3.x, OpenCL, Video acceleration, etc) will be Gallium3D only. Last I heard AMD r800 (evergreen) would be Gallium3D only, but that information might be outdated by now, as last i heard was about a year agoo.

Power management is completely independent from mesa. It will be done in the kernel (KMS) and xf86-video-ati (UMS). Probably mostly in the kernel. Don't expect all powersaving features to be supported when using UMS.

[rohcQaH]

Last I heard AMD r800 (evergreen) would be Gallium3D only, but that information might be outdated by now, as last i heard was about a year agoo.

I guess back then it was expected that G3D had taken over already. As evergreen is similar enough to r600/700 for the "old" features (ogl 2) and there's no r600g driver yet, it makes sense to add initial support to classic mesa r600, otherwise it'd be delayed quite a bit.

[HokTar]

Yes, I'm pretty sure that I read somewhere that work is already underway for evergreen, which makes me assume that it will be classic mesa stuff.

Just for your information I'm using an ati rv730, so pretty much the worst case for g3d

I read about r300g being in mesa 7.7, but how can I activate it? For example can I use it with mesa from the xorg-edgers ppa? (Obviously not on my rv730.)

For me the most interesting features are:
-- egde-smoothing (see my previous post)
-- opengl 3.x
-- video decoding is always nice
The big question is when will they appear?