[Mesa-dev] forking shared intel directory?

[Patrick Baggett]

On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 3:53 PM, Kenneth Graunke <kenneth at whitecape.org>wrote:

> On 06/21/2013 01:25 PM, Patrick Baggett wrote:
>
>> I'm not a developer, but I like to keep up with the drivers that I have
>> hardware for. Please take my opinions with a grain of salt.
>>
>> When you say you break i915 more than you improve it, do you mean to say
>> that it is difficult to improve !i915 without breaking i915 and
>> therefore to improve development speed, it should be forked OR that i915
>> doesn't receive enough testing / have maintainers who can resolve the
>> issues and so it burdens other developers to fix i915 and hence slows
>> development?
>>
>> The reason I ask if because if it is #2, then it sounds like you should
>> be looking for someone to volunteer as the official i915 maintainer [and
>> if none, then fork], but if it is #1, then maintainer or not, it will
>> slow down your efforts.
>>
>
> Mostly the former...i915c already supports everything the hardware can do,
> while we're continually adding new features to i965+ (well, mostly gen6+).
>  Things like HiZ, fast color clears, and ETC texture compression support
> affect the common miptree code, but they do nothing for i915 class
> hardware...there's only a potential downside of accidental breakage.
>
> The latter is true as well.  Unfortunately, community work is hampered by
> the fact that Intel hasn't released public documentation for i915 class
> hardware.  From time to time we've tried to find and motivate the right
> people to make that happen, but it hasn't yet.  Most people in the
> community are also more interested in working on the i915g driver.
>
>
Ah, thanks for the explanation, though I guess it doesn't do a whole, whole
lot to answer Eric's question.

On a side note: I was interested in the i915g driver, but I couldn't find
any documentation for it other than some architectural information about
the GPU's pipeline. I'm glad I wasn't just lacking the Google-foo. :\
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