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

[Brian Paul]

On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 6:29 AM, Benoit Jacob <bjacob at mozilla.com> wrote:
> 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).

Requiring Mesa 7.10 sounds OK, but we'd really like to avoid
blacklisting 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?

I don't see a bug filed related to dri2FlushFrontBuffer() but I see
one for dri2InvalidateBuffers().  Don't know if they're related.  You
should file a bug for the issue you're having in dri2 with details on
how to reproduce it.


> 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.

We recently added the git commit ID to the version string (but only if
Mesa's built in a git repo).  Would that help?

Hopefully someone can look at the bugs you've hit, get them fixed soon
and get a new Mesa release out with a version you can test against.

-Brian