On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 3:28 AM, Eric Anholt <e...@anholt.net> wrote: > On Wed, 8 Sep 2010 06:13:16 +0200, Luca Barbieri <l...@luca-barbieri.com> > wrote: > >> It would be great if Intel switched to the i915g and i965g Gallium >> drivers, since everyone else is concentrating their attention on >> Gallium, since it's much easier and better to write drivers for it. > > 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?
r300g is a lot more successful than r300 classic, support for things like texture tiling and hyper-z were a lot easier to add to the gallium driver. These were very difficult to add to classic. The thing is you miight enjoy fixing upside down FBO ordering for the 10th time, I personally would rather not know, and that goes for every other corner case in the GL spec that is abstracted away from the driver. Having to not distinguish between and FBO and a rendering buffer, having to not look at visual bits vs renderbuffer bits etc. Texture transfers, and accelerated readpixels for free, I could go on. The only upfront pain I really find with gallium is the winsys/pipe split, I find it mostly unnecessary for writing drivers on Linux and have no need to use those drivers on other non Linux OSes. Really it would be worthwhile taking the i915g driver and fixing it as an exercise so you get llvm draw for free instead of NIHing llvm draw. I'm also disappointed that i915g and i965g never materialised in a useful form, I'm still tempted to write i965g myself, and maybe after r600g is finished I can find some time to bring it up. Dave. _______________________________________________ mesa-dev mailing list mesa-dev@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-dev
