[Mesa-dev] OpenGL driver detection now implemented in Firefox/X11; some questions

[Benoit Jacob]

Hi Mesa Developers,

2 parts in this email: news about Firefox, and then some questions.

=== News about Firefox ===

This is a follow-up to earlier threads [1, 2]. As of today, Firefox Nightly [3], which will become Firefox 6, does safe OpenGL driver detection on X11, implementing [4, 5] Brian Paul's idea [6] of fork()ing, and creating a GL context in the child process.

This is good news as it means that now Firefox treats X11 on an equal footing with other desktop platforms when it comes to graphics drivers: we now have similar driver blacklists on X11 and on Windows.

The current blacklist on X11 is:
  * With Mesa, we require Mesa >= 7.10 and we block Gallium-based drivers. This is the main point I would like to discuss with you below.
  * With NVIDIA, we require version >= 257.21 just like we do on Windows
  * With FGLRX, for lack of a FGLRX version number, we require OpenGL version >= 3, in order to filter recent driver versions.

=== Questions ===

I would like to know what you think of our choice of blacklisting criteria for Mesa (which is, again, Mesa >= 7.10 and not Gallium).

Obviously my main concern is about blocking Gallium: I would like to drop that part as soon as possible.

Blocking Gallium for now was prompted by crashes [8] and a driver developer said that that was a known bug in Gallium, pointed to a mailing list discussion [9] and suggested just blocking Gallium for now.

Is there a bug filed for that, so I could CC myself?

What I really would like is to know a criterion that I can use to tell when that Gallium bug is fixed. Like a Gallium version number that I could read from the GL_RENDERER string, for example.

[1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2011-January/004877.html
[2] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2011-February/005267.html
[3] http://nightly.mozilla.org/
[4] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=639842
[5] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=645407
[6] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2011-February/005306.html
[7] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drivers
[8] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=624935
[9] http://marc.info/?l=mesa3d-dev&m=126525088903956&w=2

Thanks,
Benoit