[Mesa-dev] The current status of the gallium vmwgfx driver

[Jakob Bornecrantz]

----- Original Message ----- 
> Jakob:
> 
> That you for your very invaluable advice, which worked flawlessly for
> me until xorg-vmwgfx recently [29-30 September 2011] vanished from
> git:
> 
> "xorg/vmwgfx: Kill this target. It's not used anymore: This fixes a
> build error introduced with commit "winsys/svga: Update to vmwgfx
> kernel module 2.1" if both the svga driver and the xorg state
> tracker was enabled at the same time. If needed we can re-add a
> minimal target for basic functionality. Signed-off-by: Thomas
> Hellstrom <thellstrom at vmware.com> "
> [
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=d742a64909b2b414fc94b6f525a13ce09ca7f9f7
> ]
> 
> What does this mean; that I really never needed it in the first
> place? If so, why was I building it?
> 
> Well, I think it is needed, at least by me , because while VMware
> still provides no 'official' support, they seem to be busy
> undermining, if not sabotaging, 'unofficial' support.


We are working on improving the driver and as such have reorganized
the driver, deprecated a couple of things, moved things around and
require the latest Fusion/Workstation/Player release[1] to get 3D.
2D only will work just fine with a older release.


First you need to get mesa git master, build it and then install it
with the --enable-xa flag given.

./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-xa --with-gallium-drivers=svga

You can add "--with-dri-drivers= --disable-egl --disable-glu --disable-glw"
to only build what is needed.


We moved the xorg driver to the xf86-video-vmware repository:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-vmware/log/?h=vmwgfx_branch
Remember to check out the vmwgfx_branch branch, it might be a bit hard
to spot it in the configure log but:
"checking for XATRACKER... yes"
is what you are looking for to tell you that it is building the new driver.


Also remember to run with the latest kernel driver that supports the 2.1
interface, you can get that from the same place as before. Currently we
are upstreaming these changes as we speak, but currently only the
standalone repository is available.


Apologies if we broke things for you.


Cheers Jakob.