[Mesa-dev] Mesa/Gallium overall design

[Michel Dänzer]

On Tue, 2010-04-13 at 20:52 +1000, Dave Airlie wrote: 
> On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 8:01 PM, José Fonseca <jfonseca at vmware.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 2010-04-13 at 00:55 -0700, Dave Airlie wrote:
> 
> > Also, the closed drivers that you decided not to count were as stable as
> > they could be in the allocated time. When we were stabilizing the
> > Windows GL SVGA driver we fixed loads of *Mesa* bugs, because all the
> > windows-only applications we tested with that were never tested before.
> > Actually looking back, most of the bugs we had were in the pipe driver
> > and Mesa. That is, relatively few were in the components that make the
> > Gallium infrastructure.
> 
> As I said SVGA doesn't count its not real hw, it relies on much more
> stable host drivers yes, and is a great test platform for running DX
> conformance, but you cannot use it as a parallel to real hardware.

Why not? It looks like a GPU. It acts like a GPU. (Maybe it even smells
like a GPU? :) It must be a GPU.

I agree a showcase driver for real hardware would be preferable, but the
above seems like an unfair dismissal of the svga driver.

> The closed drivers were paid for embedded one-offs, no sustained
> developement dead ends. So again I can't count them.

Actually one of the goals of Gallium was to increase the sustainability
of the efforts under that model, by making more of the code shared /
reusable. I think it's worked out pretty well.


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