Nouveau Gallium3D, LLVMpipe In Ubuntu 11.10?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau Gallium3D, LLVMpipe In Ubuntu 11.10?

Here's the next chapter of the X.Org / Mesa plans for Ubuntu 11.10, in continuation of the earlier X.Org / Mesa talks at UDS Budapest...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTQ0MA

[MùPùF]

Largely because upstream Nouveau developers are willing to look at Gallium3D bug reports

Wait, this is partially un-true. We are only willing to look at mis-rendering Gallium3D bugs. We won't even look at crash reports if one can't reproduce it without the gallium3D driver.

Before people start calling us lazy, please ack that the team is *really* small (less than 10 active people) and only one dev is working full time on nouveau (others are just students/hobbyist).

Also, trying to fix crashes when they don't occur on our computer is almost impossible. This is why it is simpler to work and try to understand the hardware better so as we can improve the driver and hopefuly fix crashes and other issues.

I hope I have made our case.

[nzjrs]

Red Hat is using LLVMpipe with Fedora 15, and if the Red Hat engineers fix up any outstanding issues in time, Canonical may enable LLVMpipe for Ubuntu 11.10. Otherwise it's still with the (largely useless) Mesa swrast.

Everything you needed to know about Ubuntu in one quote.

[monkeynut]

Why doesn't Canonical CONTRIBUTE to the stuff they want in, rather than waiting for other companies to do it for them?

[MùPùF]

We are only willing to look at mis-rendering Gallium3D bugs. We won't even look at crash reports if one can't reproduce it without the gallium3D driver.

Actually, crashes caused (not exposed) by the gallium driver are also of our interest.

[89c51]

Why doesn't Canonical CONTRIBUTE to the stuff they want in, rather than waiting for other companies to do it for them?

i assume (at least one of the reasons) this has to do with canonical not being as big as red hat and/or a profitable company

also they seem to throw more resources in the front end (ie UI and experience) than in infrastructure

[nzjrs]

also they seem to throw more resources in the front end (ie UI and experience) than in infrastructure

proportionally, compared with their contribution to core infrastructure, perhaps. In absolute terms - not a chance.

[DaemonFC]

Granted, updating to the Linux 2.6.40 kernel in the Ubuntu 11.10 driver will likely hose the proprietary driver support anyways.

Why mince words? If you fart wrong the proprietary driver stack collapses.

[89c51]

proportionally, compared with their contribution to core infrastructure, perhaps. In absolute terms - not a chance.

something people seem to forget is that canonical and ubuntu played a significant role in the popularization of linux

and this imo this is/was a great contribution to linux in general.

[Awesomeness]

i assume (at least one of the reasons) this has to do with canonical not being as big as red hat and/or a profitable company

If Canonical didn't have the resources, then Unity and stuff wouldn't be possible.
Heck, Canonical even does two entirely different code bases for Unity: Nux-based and Qt-based. And since Nokia announced that Qt 5 will require hardware accelerated OpenGL, we can expect that Canonical will redo Unity2D from scratch in some other toolkit again (maybe EFL like with some old UNR version).

Wouldn't it be more logical to rather fix LLVMpipe to make two Unity versions unnecessary?

Yes, it would be if Canonical's main goal wasn't full copyright control.