[Mesa-dev] Potentially EOL ilo gallium driver

[Chia-I Wu]

Hi all,

Sorry for the slow response.  I think it is fine to drop the driver :(

Not because the driver is currently unmaintained, which is very true
and is a very good reason, but that there is now a Intel Vulkan
driver.  Vulkan is somewhat as low-level as Gallium is (or even
lower-level).  The driver has most things I like to see as well (low
CPU overhead, minimal/predictable heap allocation, generated register
descriptions, etc.).  Sorry for the confusions and burdens it bring to
others, and thanks to the few individuals/groups who find it useful
for their needs at various times.


On Thu, Dec 8, 2016 at 8:33 AM, Edward O'Callaghan
<funfunctor at folklore1984.net> wrote:
>
>
> On 12/08/2016 11:28 AM, Roland Scheidegger wrote:
>> I haven't seen the driver author's opinion on this yet, so it's probably
>> fair to give him some more time to answer. It's not like this is really
>> urgent...
>
> Absolutely!
>
>>
>> Roland
>>
>> Am 08.12.2016 um 01:11 schrieb Edward O'Callaghan:
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> So I'll get right to the crux of this; In summary the consensus would
>>> then be to drop ilo?
>>>
>>> If so, I am not sure of this communities procedure? However, if it helps
>>> the patch is here:
>>> https://cgit.freedesktop.org/~funfunctor/mesa/log/?h=eol-ilo
>>>
>>> Kind Regards,
>>> Edward.
>>>
>>> On 12/07/2016 07:08 AM, Ilia Mirkin wrote:
>>>> On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 3:00 PM, Rob Clark <robdclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 2:11 PM, Jason Ekstrand <jason at jlekstrand.net> wrote:
>>>>>> On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 8:39 AM, Rob Clark <robdclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 8:42 AM, Emil Velikov <emil.l.velikov at gmail.com>
>>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>> On 6 December 2016 at 03:16, Edward O'Callaghan
>>>>>>>> <funfunctor at folklore1984.net> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> This patch is to potentially remove ourself from the maintaince
>>>>>>>>> burden of the ilo driver that appears to now be essentially
>>>>>>>>> unmaintained?
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> I am not sure of our policy here or if there are too many
>>>>>>>>> users so this patch is really only to gauge a response of
>>>>>>>>> how folks feel?
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Surely you want to CC the core/sole developer of the driver when
>>>>>>>> considering its removal.
>>>>>>>> Maybe mailman was "nice" and hid his email in the header ;-)
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Either way adding Chia-I Wu to the list.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> -Emil
>>>>>>>> P.S. Not sure/sold how much of an actual burden the driver is, yet I
>>>>>>>> don't make serious gallium infra changes.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> really hasn't been a problem for me..
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> That said, it would be nice if someday someone wired this up to use
>>>>>>> glsl_to_nir path in gallium and re-used i965's nir backend.  I think
>>>>>>> that would make ilo somewhat more interesting..
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> We had a bit of a chat about this on IRC and what I told Ilia there was that
>>>>>> the more interesting thing to do, if someone really wanted to do Intel on
>>>>>> gallium, would probably be to build a new driver based on ISL, blorp, the
>>>>>> i965 compiler, NIR, and genxml.  We've made a pretty good driver-building
>>>>>> toolbox.  Having an almost unmaintained driver that has it's own hand-rolled
>>>>>> and inferrior compiler, surface layout, etc. isn't doing much good.
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> yeah, reusing the other bits would be nice too, and hopefully would be
>>>>> the long term goal if someone where to spend time on this.. I guess
>>>>> I'd prefer a more incremental approach of converting parts one by one
>>>>> if I were doing it myself.  It's kind of a moot point either way until
>>>>> someone has time/motivation to spend on it.
>>>>>
>>>>> But I've no real objection to dropping ilo until then if others feel
>>>>> strongly.. it's still there in git history so it can be resurrected if
>>>>> someone wants to convert to reuse other i965 bits incrementally rather
>>>>> than starting from scratch.
>>>>
>>>> As mentioned on IRC, I think the real use-case that ilo could cover
>>>> that i965/anv can't (easily) handle is acting as a gallium-nine
>>>> backend. (I know someone's working on DX9 over vulkan, but that's
>>>> hardly ready, and will never be available on gen6.)
>>>>
>>>> However at this time, it's not sufficiently functional to handle
>>>> gallium-nine, so I don't see any serious downside to dropping it.
>>>>
>>>>   -ilia
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>> https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-dev
>>>
>>
>
>
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