[Mesa-dev] Mesa/Gallium overall design

[Michel Dänzer]

On Mon, 2010-04-12 at 10:12 -0700, Jesse Barnes wrote: 
> On Mon, 12 Apr 2010 09:00:57 +0200
> Michel Dänzer <michel at daenzer.net> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 2010-04-12 at 08:00 +0200, Luca Barbieri wrote: 
> > > The Intel drivers also appear to be in the same situation, with
> > > classic drivers not being dropped in favor of Gallium ones, also
> > > indicating possible Gallium shortcomings leading to this.
> > 
> > The reasons for that are mostly political rather than technical.
> 
> Sorry, couldn't resist this flamebait.
> 
> My message wrt Gallium has been consistent at least, and I know the
> other Intel developers agree with me (though they may have additional
> issues with some of the interfaces specifically).
> 
> Moving to Gallium would be a huge effort for us.  We've invested a lot
> into the current drivers, stabilizing them, adding features, and
> generally supporting them.  If we moved to Gallium, much of that effort
> would be thrown away as with any large rewrite, leaving users in a
> situation where the driver that worked was unsupported and the one that
> was supported didn't work very well (at least for quite some time).  

This may be true now, but only because you guys refused to pick up
Gallium early on. That's what I was referring to, the technical reasons
above are merely consequences of that decision IMHO.

If you had picked it up, the resulting drivers could be expected to be
at least as stable and performant, but definitely provide more features
(e.g. OpenVG support) now. Gallium as a whole would probably be better
for it as well.


> I really wish the move to Gallium had been a more gradual evolution of
> the current code base, since it would have allowed working drivers to
> take advantage of the new infrastructure over time (though not having
> worked with Gallium I won't pretend to suggest how this might have
> worked best).

Indeed, would have been difficult I think given Gallium's goal of a
radically simplified driver interface.


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer           |                http://www.vmware.com
Libre software enthusiast         |          Debian, X and DRI developer