[Mesa-dev] Guidance in dwelling in the world of GPU driver development.

[Rob Clark]

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 9:15 AM, Leander Bessa Beernaert
<leanderbb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks!
>
> Not sure yet what I'll be working on yet, but I'll be sure to look into
> nouveau.
>
> Would it be possible for me to go about and work on OpenGL features which
> are beyond the capabilities of my GPU?

short answer, "it depends"..

in some cases you might be able to emulate one feature with another,
emulate it in the shader, etc.  I emulate GL_QUADS support on gles hw
with a driver generated index buffer, for example.  Or, at least a
couple drivers generate shader code to emulate two-sided-color.  But
in a lot of cases there might not be a reasonable way to emulate some
feature.

Btw, if you haven't seen it already:

  http://people.freedesktop.org/~marcheu/linuxgraphicsdrivers.pdf

not complete, but still a pretty useful newbie intro to the linux
graphics stack.  And:

  http://gallium.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

up to date gallium docs (if you prefer the generated html vs reading
the .rst files in src/gallium/docs ;-))

BR,
-R

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