Marek Files Patches For Floating-Point In Mesa Master

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Marek Files Patches For Floating-Point In Mesa Master

Forget about the fun being had today on April Fools' Day with openSUSE / Gentoo / Arch / Debian supposedly merging to form the Centerbury Linux distribution, GNOME 3.0 being delayed until September, or hypothetical Linux disasters as there is actually some serious and important news: Marek Olšák has published his patch-set he wishes to push into Mesa master for OpenGL 3.0 floating-point textures and render-buffers support. He's pushing for this legally-iffy code to go into the mainline Mesa code-base but to block it by an opt-in --enable-texture-float build flag...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTI4MQ

[pvtcupcakes]

Hopefully this will get merged. I noticed that the other half of Marek's floating point branch got merged a couple days ago. It was the color_buffer extension which has something to do with clamping.

Hopefully all this can be quickly ported to r600g.

[89c51]

Hopefully all this can be quickly ported to r600g.

this is what i wanted to ask

does the patches work on all gallium cards right???



Either way thumbs up and czech beers for marek

[RavFX]

According to my git-log scanning,

r300g cards are totally supported.
Nouveau guy ported some or all of the current merged stuff in nv50/nvc0.
r600g don't have anything in yet

[V!NCENT]

I just had an idea today...

This involves sending floating point to the GPU right? What if it was a big fsckin integer, with a float flag and a comma position flag, then hack the firmware to calculate that as float?

Does this circumvent the patent?

[aaaantoine]

If that's all there is to it, then I have to ask: why is there a patent on sending floating point numbers to a GPU in the first place?

[Qaridarium]

marek is just impressiv the r300 (openGL2.1 hardware) do more openGL3 than the dx10/openGL3 hardware like hd2600 ...

really strange...

[jntesteves]

If that's all there is to it, then I have to ask: why is there a patent on sending floating point numbers to a GPU in the first place?

I think it's floating-point encoded textures, which may cover some kind of codec. It's probably all bullshit anyway, but there's a risk involved in using it without written permission and there goes a lot of money in defending yourself from patent infringement, even if it's bullshit.

The real problem with patents is that they accept anything to be patented nowadays.

[Melcar]

Nice. In after character limit.

[smitty3268]

I don't understand at all why h.264 patented code was agreed to be allowed in (not compiled by default) but they have an issue with this code doing the same thing.

Was the h.264 decision reversed later? Are people making different decisions on a patent-by-patent basis? It would be nice if they clarified their position and set down some hard rules about how it should be handled. Even if it's just "this will never happen" at least that would clarify things for anyone who wants to contribute.