Luc Modularizes Mesa, DRI Drivers

[Hephasteus]

Great job Luc!! Everyone's making fantastic progress but I hope it gets further along to provide a nice soft warm place for windows converts to land. Everyone was trying to jump ship in the fedora 10/ubuntu 9.04 days. Let's just hope this gets done well on this next round of releases as it will mean millions of users. I'm already seeing large groups of linux users on the net which is unheard of 2 years ago.

[libv]

Tell me the story of radeonhd again? :P

RadeonHD started afresh late july 2007. We were not at liberty to discuss anything with the outside world (while those who imposed that limitation on us happily did so all the time).

We discussed basing our work on top of avivo, but avivo was GPL-ed, and we were unable to get that to change (and i am not sure whether, at the time, you would have at all been willing to change that when we came a-knocking). Avivo did relatively little as well, so we soon progressed to a point where we overshot avivo functionality (not hard when spending worktime on it and when the hardware is available).

GPL was the main reason why avivo became just one of many levers that made AMD decide to open source things. But it was a more significant one than some other people thought they were (judging from the claims they made shortly after the announcements/releases from september 2007).

We figured that graphics drivers were probably going to be able to work out -retro, or have an alias or something. I admit it's not ideal though; we could do something like display the root weave in everything but RC/stable tarballs?

Yeah, that sounds like a plan. Although i still do not understand why the root weave had to go to begin with. It is all about delaying the unblanking of the displays, and it shouldn't be impossible to delay thsi unblanking a bit further than is/was the case.

If nothing is running on top, you then get a rootweave. If anything is running on top, you get to see what it is, without seeing the rootweave or the crapped up/old framebuffer content in between.

[libv]

'API' implies some vague sort of design. $(includedir)/xorg is many things, but not designed. The idea is to basically incrementally create useful APIs that everyone can use without too much pain. You should know this, having written a Screen(Pre)Init before ...

Again, what does one gain from moving drivers back into the xserver that one doesn't gain from a tinderbox? I do not see it.

Current slightly more distributed model does not impede such things either, it just is a slight bit more hassle, and therefor (and only therefor) requires the developer to think a bit further about the changes he is about to make (although it hasn't stopped anyone from breaking things horribly in the past).

My analysis: people just do not want to do this tiny bit of extra thinking.

[libv]

Great job Luc!! Everyone's making fantastic progress but I hope it gets further along to provide a nice soft warm place for windows converts to land. Everyone was trying to jump ship in the fedora 10/ubuntu 9.04 days. Let's just hope this gets done well on this next round of releases as it will mean millions of users. I'm already seeing large groups of linux users on the net which is unheard of 2 years ago.

Well, it is not just about windows users. It will also lure more people away from closed source drivers, as those closed source drivers are simply easier to procure and install. And, it will also make it easier for those who have used open source drivers before, who before were forced to update part of their installation or just dist-upgrade.

Imagine how many more people will be installing, testing and using the latest graphics driver bits when this process is made easy.

[daniels]

RadeonHD started afresh late july 2007. We were not at liberty to discuss anything with the outside world (while those who imposed that limitation on us happily did so all the time).

We discussed basing our work on top of avivo, but avivo was GPL-ed, and we were unable to get that to change (and i am not sure whether, at the time, you would have at all been willing to change that when we came a-knocking). Avivo did relatively little as well, so we soon progressed to a point where we overshot avivo functionality (not hard when spending worktime on it and when the hardware is available).

GPL was the main reason why avivo became just one of many levers that made AMD decide to open source things. But it was a more significant one than some other people thought they were (judging from the claims they made shortly after the announcements/releases from september 2007).

You never asked about the license. The -radeon guys did, and we agreed to license the bit of code they asked for under MIT/X11.

[libv]

You never asked about the license. The -radeon guys did, and we agreed to license the bit of code they asked for under MIT/X11.

As said, we were not allowed to talk to anyone about this. We even had a major incident where one of the SUSE guys posted a news item over ATIs plans in late august, and in the end that turned out to be a leak from inside AMD/ATI. Heck, if Michael hadn't posted his article ahead of the latest schedule change (as no-one informed him about the change in plans), we might still be waiting for that announcement.

And it has to be said, I am not too certain how you would have responded when asked in July 2007 by the SUSE people, before the big event, as opposed to afterwards, when asked by Redhat and ATI.

[tapir]

Thank you luc.

From the diagrams on your fosdem slides it's obvious -even for a non-programmer like myself- that the linux graphics stack can use some improvements, and it's great to see someone doing something about it.