AMD's Position On Gallium3D Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD's Position On Gallium3D Support

If you're a member of the Phoronix Forums where John Bridgman, the AMD employee in charge of the open-source ATI graphics strategy, is known to frequently post (with over 4,200 comments) along with many other X.Org developers and AMD employees, you pretty much know what there is to know about their position on Gallium3D and other topics. However, if you don't, this post is for you...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODE1MA

[blindfrog]

I think one can expect r900's to hit around summer 2011 earliest considering their recent roadmaps 1 1/2+ years per "generation". So Gallium for r900 is a given really... At least I sure hope so.

[d2kx]

Rumours are (they really do sound true, so you can expect it to happen) that R9xx has been delayed a bit and that the next generation will be a mix betweeen R8xx and R9xx due to TSMC being crap at manufacturing chips even at 40nm (R9xx is 32nm). I can imagine the r600 driver being able to add support for that.

[HokTar]

Kudos to Corbin. He is surely awesome. I hope he will continue working on radeon drivers!

Just a question: if google will really open-source the vp8 codec, as was pointed out in another thread [1], where could it be accelerated in hardware? I mean generation/driver, of course. I think it's no problem for r600(g) but what about others?

[1] http://newteevee.com/2010/04/12/goog...r-html5-video/

[bridgman]

I just posted a bit of an update. After some discussion internally, we're thinking about starting a new copy of the r600 driver for Evergreen. The programming model is still very similar to earlier chips but the register addresses have moved around a lot. This gives us a good excuse to start a Gallium3D-based driver earlier - not sure if we are going to do it or not but we're going to look at it.

So... the only "definitive" change in plans is that there is likely to be a separate mesa driver for Evergreen, basically an edited copy of the r600 driver. I guess we might call it r800 to make everyone happy, as long as you all accept that there is no r800 just Evergreen

Not sure what will happen with ddx and Gallium3D driver yet; we'll revisit that after getting further on the Evergreen Mesa driver and discussing options with Jerome & Corbin.

[Louise]

I very much like you guys take on this Features >< implementation >< what users want.

Personally I'd rather have you went directly with Gallium, even though it might give users a working driver faster with classic mesa, but in the long run it would accelerate the development with a Gallium driver, the way I see it.

That being said for R500-R700, I think those should be completed before going Gallium

[HokTar]

I just posted a bit of an update. After some discussion internally, we're thinking about starting a new copy of the r600 driver for Evergreen. The programming model is still very similar to earlier chips but the register addresses have moved around a lot. This gives us a good excuse to start a Gallium3D-based driver earlier - not sure if we are going to do it or not but we're going to look at it.

So... the only "definitive" change in plans is that there is likely to be a separate mesa driver for Evergreen, basically an edited copy of the r600 driver. I guess we might call it r800 to make everyone happy, as long as you all accept that there is no r800 just Evergreen

Not sure what will happen with ddx and Gallium3D driver yet; we'll revisit that after getting further on the Evergreen Mesa driver and discussing options with Jerome & Corbin.

Corbin already mentioned that Jerome will have a presentable r600g driver soon - whatever that means. Can't you just use that as a basis for r800 and go galilum-only? I know it seems and probably is risky but it would speed the transition up on all fronts.

[bridgman]

If that is the plan, then yes I think we would try to build on top of that 600g. Either way, we need to get Evergreen running 3D to ensure that we know how to program it, and we can do that just as well with classic Mesa and do it right now.

If all the stars align, the sequence will probably go something like :

- we get Evergreen 3D running on a modified copy of the classic 600 driver
- in parallel, Corbin & Jerome get 600g running some real apps
- we collectively figure out what to do about header files since reg addresses changed
- if we have a good solution for both address sets to coexist then add Evergreen to 600g
- if we don't have a good solution for both address sets to coexist then create a separate 800g

Something like that anyways. Too soon to know for sure.

[Qaridarium]

google start to dev on radeon:

"The "R300g" driver that supports the R300/400/500 GPUs (up through the ATI Radeon X1000 series graphics cards) was started actually not by AMD but instead Corbin Simpson, which was a developer at university participating in a previous Google Summer of Code experiment. This ATI Gallium3D driver is now beating out the classic Mesa driver and is catching up to the old proprietary ATI Catalyst drivers. "

bridgman i tould you google jumps into the fight

this summer google will do it again and spend a lot of money on summer of code@ 'radeon' driver

[Qaridarium]

I guess we might call it r800 to make everyone happy, as long as you all accept that there is no r800 just Evergreen

R800 is only Leet/1337 speak r800 means ever and its the short version of evergreen...

Imagine it... R800 Ever (green)