On Thu, Jun 20, 2024 at 12:30 PM Adam Jackson <a...@redhat.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 20, 2024 at 10:20 AM Erik Faye-Lund < > erik.faye-l...@collabora.com> wrote: > >> When we did Amber, we had a lot better reason to do so than "these >> drivers cause pain when doing big tree updates". The maintenance burden >> imposed by the drivers proposed for removal here is much, much smaller, >> and doesn't really let us massively clean up things in a way comparable >> to last time. >> > > Yeah, amber was primarily about mothballing src/mesa/drivers/ in my > opinion. It happened to correlate well with the GL 1.x vs 2.0 generational > divide, but that was largely because we had slowly migrated all the GL2 > hardware to gallium drivers (iris and crocus and i915g and r300g were a lot > of work, let's do remember), so the remaining "classic" drivers were only > the best choice for fixed function hardware. Nice bright line in the sand, > there, between the register bank of an overgrown SGI Indy as your state > vector, and the threat of a Turing-complete shader engine. > > I have a harder time finding that line in the sand today. ES3? Compute > shaders? Vulkan 1.0? I'm not sure any of these so fundamentally change the > device programming model, or the baseline API assumptions, that we would > benefit by requiring it of the hardware. I'm happy to be wrong about that! > We're using compute shaders internally in more and more ways, for example, > maybe being able to assume them would be a win. If there's a better design > to be had past some feature level, then by all means let's have that > discussion. > > But if the issue is we don't like how many drivers there are then I am > sorry but at some level that is simply the dimension of the problem. Mesa's > breadth of hardware coverage is at the core of its success. You'd be > hard-pressed to find a GLES1 part anymore, but there are brand-new systems > with Mali-400 MP GPUs, and there's no reason the world's finest GLES2 > implementation should stop working there. > Same. I kinda think the next major cut will be when we go Vulkan-only and leave Zink and a bunch of legacy drivers in a GL branch. That's probably not going to happen for another 5 years at least. ~Faith
