[Mesa-dev] Time to merge threaded GL dispatch? (aka glthread)

[Jan Ziak]

Hello

I am against application profiles - in the form of "a
community-maintained whitelist of apps" or in any other form
explicitly associating the name/ID of an app with a Mesa variable
which controls the behavior of Mesa.

Application profiles would be a manifestation of poor algorithms in
the OpenGL implementation.

Application profiles would hinder entry of new players into the Linux
OpenGL application market, because their applications would be at the
disadvantage of not being in the whitelist. Application profiles would
make competition (economics) less effective.

A solution superior to application profiles is to analyze
application's OpenGL usage patterns and make optimization decisions
based on those patterns. The OpenGL implementation (Mesa) can store
the patterns and computed values in a disk cache to avoid
recomputation if the app is started again.

Jan

> Yes, I'm aware that glthread is far from perfect. However, I don't consider
> that an issue. My idea is that the actual work will take place in master. I
> have zero faith that any work on that will take place outside of master.
>
> Currently I don't expect it to work with any GL4 apps, because the threaded
> dispatch isn't aware of many GL4 functions. Initially we'll have a
> community-maintained whitelist of apps benefitting from glthread.
>
> Marek