[Mesa-dev] cairo as state tracker

[Jason Ekstrand]

On Tue, Aug 9, 2016 at 8:11 AM, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult <
enrico.weigelt at gr13.net> wrote:

> On 07.08.2016 12:50, Marek Olšák wrote:
>
> > It would mainly be a futile task if it had to compete with their
> > official Mesa driver.
>
> Not quite. Would give us all of gallium's capabilities also for
> the intel chips, for example having lots of different state trackers.
> (coming back to my original intention of cairo as a gallium st)
>

Gallium isn't an API you support it's a way you write your driver.
Switching to gallium is a fundamental change in the way the entire driver
is architected.  It could be done (and recent changes in our driver are
shrinking the dri portion so it's getting easier) but it's a massive pile
of work with mediocre benefit.  I could go on a very long rant about it but
the short version is: If we were writing a new driver or if something came
up that made gallium hugely benificial, we might consider it but at the
moment, there's no good reason.

As far as cairo goes, I'd much rather see the GL backend improved or a
Vulkan backend added as those are both stable industry-supported APIs
rather than running directly on gallium.

--Jason
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