A Gallium3D State Tracker For Vulkan?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Gallium3D State Tracker For Vulkan?

It didn't take long after yesterday's Vulkan 1.0 release for a question to be asked whether there could be a Gallium3D Vulkan state tracker developed...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Gallium3D-Vulkan-ST-Possible

[haagch]

So having Vulkan go through gallium wouldn't make too much sense, but could it maybe be somehow "piped through", so the Gallium HUD could be used with it, at least the parts of the gallium HUD that make sense for vulkan?

[blackout23]

A Pipe Driver would be much more interesting, if that would allow using the State Tracker Interface on all Vulkan drivers. This might allow the prop. NVIDIA driver to use Gallium-Nine in Wine this way.

[man-walking]

"...responded to by David Airlie who commented that Gallium3D is higher-level than OpenGL"
Huh?
Airlie hasn't said that nor mentioned OpenGL
Gallium3D is almost in same level-concept of Vulkan, both are *lower* than OpenGL


On 17 February 2016 at 18:31, Ernst Sjöstrand <ernstp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Sorry if this is a silly question but I was thinking that there would
> be a Vulkan Gallium state tracker in development behind closed doors
> somehow. However I guess that's not the case?

It doesn't make sense to write a vulkan state tracker for gallium, as
vulkan is a lower level interface
than gallium,

The only thing that makes sense is to refactor pieces of the gallium
drivers out into some shared
driver code, usually the compiler and memory layout stuff (like Intel
have done).

You could in theory write a vulkan level gallium layer, but it really
would end up looking like
vulkan so would just be an abstraction of an abstraction.

Dave

[89c51]

So for mesa each mfg will have to write its own driver right?

[ernstp]

"commented that Gallium3D is higher-level than OpenGL" | s/OpenGL/Vulkan/ ?

Guess it was a good question after all. :-)

[You-]

What is the present state of TGSI? Will/Could it be replaced with NIR or is that an intel only thing? (AFAIK Intel has/will make NIR <=> vulkan/spirv translation layer)

State trackers are too high level, but if TGSI could be modified/replaced with something that can be translated into spir-v, that will allow the older drivers to also use vulkan

[artivision]

He probably meant to replace Gallium with Vulkan+ named Germanium (maybe even TGSI with SPIRV). So newer SM5 GPUs will use Germanium as Vulkan, while older SM3-4 GPUs will use it as abstraction IL only.

[Pecisk]

There's no practical application for this. OpenGL on Vulkan however is something interesting to pursue.

[Kemosabe]

Stupid question but why not just replace Gallium with Vulkan?