Android Support Merged Into Mesa / Gallium3D
Merged by Chia-I Wu earlier in the week was adding a few Mesa / Gallium3D changes for Android. An Android back-end was also added to the EGL state tracker for Gallium3D. These core Mesa / Gallium3D commits were then followed by adding support for the Android build system to the Mesa tree. With this work, Mesa can now be built and used in a clean manner for this Google operating system.
Chia-I Wu is the developer that's been working on bringing up Mesa for Android x86 going back to late 2009. (Up to this point most of the Mesa on Android efforts were housed in third-party Git repositories.) He now works at the LunarG consulting firm for Mesa and has also worked on the EGL and Vega state tracker among other Mesa action items.
Hitting the Mesa tree tonight from Chia-I is Android support for the Radeon R600 Gallium3D driver. This allows Android x86 to be used on modern systems with Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000/6000 (or Fusion) graphics while having hardware acceleration. Chia-I says that it works with SurfaceFlinger (Android's display server and compositor) and with 2D applications using RGB/RGBA visuals. Some 3D applications are also working using the Radeon Gallium3D stack, but others have rendering defects.
Chia-I Wu also has a few other Android-related patches floating around on the Mesa mailing list.
Google uses Gallium3D in Chrome OS -- even for the unofficial Intel Gallium3D driver. Mesa / Gallium3D isn't much of an aim in Google's current Android world due to the target of embedded/mobile devices that are so commonly dominated by proprietary graphics drivers, but that may change.
Those wanting to toy with mainline Mesa on Android will need to use Mesa Git or wait around for the release of Mesa 7.12 in January.
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