[Mesa-dev] Mesa/Gallium overall design

[Dave Airlie]

On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 6:23 PM, Luca Barbieri <luca at luca-barbieri.com> wrote:
> Has Intel or anyone else considered open sourcing their Windows
> DirectX 10 user mode DDI drivers, porting them to Gallium and filling
> in the missing GL-specific functionality from the GL drivers?
>
> That might prove easier than porting the GL drivers (the DirectX 10
> design is much closer), and allows to take advantage of the Windows
> codebase, which is likely to have had the benefit of much more work
> done on it.
>
> With the addition of a DX10 state tracker, you could then build Linux
> and Windows drivers from the same codebase and join the driver teams,
> with obvious benefits.
>
> I think this should be the real advantage of Gallium, from the
> perspective of an hardware company: coverage of all APIs (OpenGL,
> X11/EXA, DirectX 10, maybe DirectX 9 too) from a single codebase.
>
> The fact that VMware does not release their DirectX state trackers
> hampers this somewhat, but they can be independently reimplemented,
> and they may be willing to license them to Intel or other companies.

I think if Intel had any cross-OS team it would be a possiblity but
they don't and I'm not sure if they can even manage it. The problem
with releasing a merged OS driver isn't the code as much as the
lawyers I'd suspect.

Dave.