Luc Modularizes Mesa, DRI Drivers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Luc Modularizes Mesa, DRI Drivers

Last month at the X@FOSDEM meeting in Belgium, Luc Verhaegen gave a talk on cleaning up the Linux graphics driver stack. This talk was met by some that agreed with his views and, well, others that didn't exactly see eye-to-eye with him. He shared with everyone his views on changes that should be made to the Mesa/X.Org/DRM stack, including some greater modularization, in an effort to make the testing / build process easier, drive greater maintainability of drivers, and unifying components by providing more shared libraries and formalizing different APIs...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODA2MQ

[EmbraceUnity]

I love open source. Don't like something? Shut up and code!

Good work, Luc, however this may turn out.

[duby229]

I agree completely. This is a great example of open source at work. I like what he did, and I hope others do too.

I'll admit that Luc has some epic wastes of time on his record, but I really like what he did here. From what I can tell it really is a much cleaner structure. I actually think it is a bit easier to follow along with what the code is trying to do now.

[libv]

I'll admit that Luc has some epic wastes of time on his record, ...

This has piqued my interest, what epic wastes of time would that be

Anyway, glad that you like it, i hope to get through the SDKs today.

[miles]

This has piqued my interest, what epic wastes of time would that be

Recently, there has been disturbing reports claiming you had indulged in a houseplant, which you would look at several times during the day.

While the Xorg foundation is still investing your keylogs to assess its impact on your productivity, the board seems also concerned that you would in the future use it as an excuse to violate article 14.7 and install a windows in your office (thus terminating commit rights to the Xorg project).

[V!NCENT]

This has piqued my interest, what epic wastes of time would that be

Anyway, glad that you like it, i hope to get through the SDKs today.

So I can assume you're Luc?

Thanks for your efforts!

[libv]

Recently, there has been disturbing reports claiming you had indulged in a houseplant, which you would look at several times during the day.

While the Xorg foundation is still investing your keylogs to assess its impact on your productivity, the board seems also concerned that you would in the future use it as an excuse to violate article 14.7 and install a windows in your office (thus terminating commit rights to the Xorg project).

So you think that my efforts to straighten out the X.org foundation are not very productive? And you also do not think that, well, spending 100k of probably IBM and SUN money without any accountability is well, taking a bit of a liberty?

And, i had to go and waste a vast amount of effort into condensing the irc logs and making them (slightly) readable. Those irclogs were dumped in our laps like this (even though they clearly show that Bart had produced minutes at some point in time) just so that all discussion could be shut up with useless info that they assumed no-one would read anyway. The only action possible against that was to go and waste time on them.

X.org will be better run in future because of this. But whatever.

[karl]

from the FOSDEM videos Michael posted here it seemed like Intel guys were not convinced this will work

I'm interested to see how this will turn out, if indeed will improve things or not.

where/how will we hear about the results? (I'm no kernel/video coder so I can't just grok through code)

[libv]

from the FOSDEM videos Michael posted here it seemed like Intel guys were not convinced this will work

I'm interested to see how this will turn out, if indeed will improve things or not.

where/how will we hear about the results? (I'm no kernel/video coder so I can't just grok through code)

Oh, it works, it simply works I have tested in on 7.0, 7.2, 7.4, 7.6 and 7.7 for radeon (r200, r500), unichrome and swrast.

And as said before, the Makefile work needed to build the libraries and the SDK will hopefully get finalised tonight, so everyone can go and verify that this really does work.

But as long as this is not accepted as the way forward, it will be a pain keeping the SDK and the separate drivers up to date. But it is not impossible, just a bit of a hassle.

[markg85]

First; this is a very nice example where open source software is just awesome! Don't loke something change it.. sadly that is only true if you're a skilled programmer.

@luc (libv)
Why don't you simply fork xorg till they allow your structure to be THE structure to write drivers? You seem like someone that has the knowledge and will to do so and that will "fix" your issue of keeping your code working on xorg.. (if you fork, please enable ctrl+alt+bcksp by default again )

Anyhow, awsesome job however it turns out.