DRI2 Comes Closer To Its Debut

[phoronix]

Phoronix: DRI2 Comes Closer To Its Debut

Kristian Høgsberg, the creator of AIGLX, has announced on the X.Org mailing list that he is beginning to merge his new DRI2 components. This work includes the new DRI2 module, glxdri2 to GLX, and DRM/Mesa patches...

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

[ioannis]

How does DRI2 relate to Gallium3D?

[damentz]

Nice, what kind of general performance boost would you expect on shader/texture intensive games?

[glisse]

How does DRI2 relate to Gallium3D?

Gallium3D is a new infrastructure for mesa to simply driver writing and ease up optimization and new hardware support. As such Gallium3D pretty much ignore everything from the underlying OS (ie it does not know about DRM or DRI or DRI2). So DRI2 won't impact much gallium3d in itself. But it will impact the winsys layer and so features and integration of the GL pipeline inside X will be a lot better and cleaner (read proper compositing).

[glisse]

Nice, what kind of general performance boost would you expect on shader/texture intensive games?

Well in long run DRI2 should help to get rid of the big DRI lock we have now. I think getting rid of this lock might give some speedup but this isn't the bottleneck for games. For instance for radeon with doom3 the main bottleneck is proper fbo or read back of framebuffer. A proper memory manager is the things that will help in this case (well we can improve the current performance but it will be pain full and ugly i think).

[b0le]

Will the r300 gallium driver be using dri2? (and is there anything yet available for testing for the r300 (radeon x800) for both the gallium driver and dri2?)

[thoemy]

Well in long run DRI2 should help to get rid of the big DRI lock we have now.

Does this mean we can have DRI and fast user switching work together?

[glisse]

Will the r300 gallium driver be using dri2? (and is there anything yet available for testing for the r300 (radeon x800) for both the gallium driver and dri2?)

Yes it will and right now code sleep on my private repo at fdo but there is nothings interesting or easily usable yet. We have many things to sort out before stabilizing|freezing few API.

[glisse]

Does this mean we can have DRI and fast user switching work together?

I don't think DRI prevented fast user switching, i think the problem lies mainly with drm single master limitation. But i am not very familiar with user switching and how it works.

[drag]

Absolutely kick-ass. Keep up the good work!

I look forward to all of it.

(and maybe have the Tungsten Graphics folks update their gallium3D wiki to include DRI2 so that people don't get confused and think there are these rival 3D driver models or anything like that.)

Please come back and announce when you guys are ready for some beta testers...