AMD's Open-Source Radeon Driver After Four Years

[BlackStar]

This is awesome. Thanks!

[V!NCENT]

Given that Mac OS X has shitty OpenGL performance and the FireGL on Linux is so damn shitty, one would think that AMD:
1. Implements a co-working code path for an additional binary Digital Rights Management blob so it can work parallel with the Gallium driver;
2. Puts Gallium3D onto Windows;
3. Puts lots of devs onto the Gallium3D driver (as well as some on speed optimizing to keep up with nVidia on FireGL);
4. Gives Apple a kickass Gallium oppertunity with the X.org codebase renewal;
5. Dumps FireGL entirely when the time's ready.
(6. delays Gallium3D work mostly when nVidia gets an edge, but on the long run starting with id's Rage, the graphics speed is no longer about raw speed but latency, since consoles dictate graphics mostly anyways)

I'd say dump that horrible POS called FireGL and improve massively on the open source front so you can get quality drivers with huge benifits on all fronts.

The time has come to dominate!

[jonwil]

Ok, so can someone tell me what is so hard about adding the missing features like GL3, MSAA etc into the open-source drivers?

Lack of features in Mesa/Gallium3D/DRM/some other library the open drivers use? Lack of interest from the devs to support these features properly? Legal issues (similar to the legal issues that prevent AMD from releasing the specs for the hardware video decoding logic in the GPUs)

[agd5f]

Ok, so can someone tell me what is so hard about adding the missing features like GL3, MSAA etc into the open-source drivers?

Lack of features in Mesa/Gallium3D/DRM/some other library the open drivers use? Lack of interest from the devs to support these features properly? Legal issues (similar to the legal issues that prevent AMD from releasing the specs for the hardware video decoding logic in the GPUs)

Lack of manpower. Adding support for these features is a lot of work, but is progressing.

[bridgman]

Yep. IIRC most of the remaining work required is up in the common Mesa code.

The Intel devs set up a detailed task list for getting to GL 3 and talked about it at XDC earlier in the week. There is a separate Phoronix article about their talk.

Intel presentation : http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=OTkxMg

Task list : http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/WorkQueue

The list doesn't distinguish between work required in common Mesa code (which only has to be done once) and work required in the HW driver code (which has to be done once for each HW driver), but you can get a pretty good idea from looking at the individual tasks.

MSAA is more or less independent and almost totally specific to driver HW. I don't *think* there is any common code required but not 100% sure.

[curaga]

IIRC for nouveau it is only (mostly) the common gallium code that is missing for MSAA.

[Welsh Dwarf]

Could you please fix your links so that we can see what you're getting at.


Oh, and, for all those wondering about GL3: the intel guys are pumping out patches at an almost alarming rate on the mailing list atm.