> I keep hearing this, and a bunch of people have been trying to build the > equivalent gallium hardware drivers to various core drivers for a long > time. So, can we get some details on a success story? What driver is > now more correct/faster than it was before? By how much? How much of > that was hardware enabling you did on the gallium side only?
I think Corbin Simpson and Marek Olsak could be the best people to comment on this, since they mostly wrote the r300g driver, which seems now to be the preferred driver, instead of the older r300 classic DRI driver. Dave Airlie extensively contributed both to the r300 DRI driver and to r600 Gallium drivers, and possibly others are in a similar position. Keith Whitwell wrote the current Gallium i965 driver, and as far as I know stopped work on it due to other commitments. Personally I never worked on classic drivers, so I can't really give a thorough comparison. The general advantages of Gallium are, as I see it, are: - Ability to write the driver in a more maintainable "object-oriented" fashion, where you just provide code to create hardware-specific objects from general self-contained descriptions and then bind them to the pipeline - Rich set of auxiliary code, much more modern than the Mesa code (kind of like your GLSL compiler vs the old one). Among others, this includes the draw module that by default executes vertex and geometry shaders with LLVM. - Ability to get support for APIs other than OpenGL (e.g. the DDX interface, OpenVG, with work on Cairo, OpenCL, video APIs) mostly for free, and much more efficiently and cleanly than if they were layered on top of OpenGL, which may require custom interfaces anyway - Sharing the code to support all the legacy features and weird corner cases of OpenGL and not exposing the driver to them _______________________________________________ mesa-dev mailing list mesa-dev@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-dev
