Lobbying VirtualBox for Gallium3D Support

[wswartzendruber]

Here's the ticket:

http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/6525

[Lykos]

In your Ticket you claimed, OpenCL was available over Gallium3D.
Is this really true? If so, is it usable? How can I test it?
Besides there really are some state trackers worth mentioning like OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0, EXA and X-Video.

[wswartzendruber]

I think that might've been incorrect.

[Lykos]

I did some research and found:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/clover
But it doesn't look very active nor does it seem to be really usefull...

[gremble]

I did some research and found:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/clover
But it doesn't look very active nor does it seem to be really usefull...

The last phoronix report on the subject is here:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=Nzc4NQ

[gremble]

Zack mentions is here all too briefly, and hasn't yet responded to the comment OpenCL based comment:

http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-features.html

[Cyberax]

"This is exactly the issue, "pointless untill there're host drivers based on gallium for most gpu's on most OS'es"

That's absolutely incorrect. A host OS only needs a working OpenGL driver capable of GLSL (even a closed source one).

It's the _guest_ OS which needs Gallium driver which relays commands to the host OS. Host OS then uses its OpenGL/DirectX drivers to interpret them.

In future, host OS might directly relay commands to its native Gallium hardware driver. But it's in no way a hard requirement.

[wswartzendruber]

I'm sorry, but I'm getting really irritated with these people. That VMware code I posted is open to the public. They can go in there and see, for themselves, how to do this. I have tried my best to make them aware of the benefits. And I see no reason why this can't be done using the existing Chromium pipe they have setup.

What am I missing?

[Svartalf]

I'm sorry, but I'm getting really irritated with these people. That VMware code I posted is open to the public. They can go in there and see, for themselves, how to do this. I have tried my best to make them aware of the benefits. And I see no reason why this can't be done using the existing Chromium pipe they have setup.

What am I missing?

Oracle.

I strongly suspect that they're having to justify anything they do within the context of what Oracle does. 3D isn't one of those things and it was a hack on top of things to begin with that they were able to get it all working. Since they're not 3D people to begin with and since this was something that a competitor did, they're blinded by things- and don't see the value of it and see it as just "throwing away good code" to paraphrase the responder in the bug entry.