[Mesa-dev] Potentially EOL ilo gallium driver

Wed Feb 1 12:49:45 UTC 2017

Hi guys,

Chia-I Wu thanks so much for getting back to me on this and I think your
right that Vk is the future - indeed the history was a little bit of
shame but I guess thats the nature of these things :/. I rebased the
dropping patch here

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/~funfunctor/mesa/log/?h=eol-ilo

Maybe I get your Rb or someone else`s here to go though with this?

Kindly,
Edward.

On 12/08/2016 12:49 PM, Chia-I Wu wrote:
> 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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