[Mesa-dev] [PATCH 2/2] egl: add EGL_platform_device support

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Sat, 27 Apr 2019 09:38:27 -0400
Marek Olšák <maraeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Those are all valid reasons, but I don't wanna expose swrast for AMD's
> customers.

Hi Marek,

is you objection that you will never want to see any software renderer
in the list, or that you don't want to see a software renderer only as
long as it doesn't actually work?

Why do you not "wanna expose swrast for AMD's customers"?

Are you talking about swrast specifically or all the software renderers
in Mesa?

I'm not an AMD customer if you mean someone paying for support rather
than just buying their hardware, so I cannot speak for them. However, I
would be very happy to have a software renderer available to be picked
the same way as any other hardware renderer, so that I can use it in
graphical test suites (a point from Anholt) testing also the EGL glue
in addition to the pixels produced.

The thing will be run on boxes with AMD GPUs, and in those cases there
must be a way to *not* use the AMD GPU, and use the software renderer
instead when wanted. Not by environment variables or anything hacky
like that, but by deliberately choosing the software renderer in the
program. It will need an EGLSurface too.

How would this be made to work in the future?


Thanks,
pq

> 
> Marek
> 
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 5:45 AM Mathias Fröhlich <Mathias.Froehlich at gmx.net>
> wrote:
> 
> > Hi Marek,
> >
> > On Wednesday, 24 April 2019 02:01:42 CEST Marek Olšák wrote:  
> > > Adam, did you notice my original suggestion "If there is at least 1 drm
> > > device, swrast won't be in the list."? which means swrast would be in the
> > > list for your "dumb" GPUs.  
> >
> > Imagine a box with a low end drm capable hardware chip like you find
> > sometimes
> > in server type boxes (intel/matrox...). Otherwise the box is equipped with
> > lots of cpu
> > power. This is something that you will find a lot in that major
> > engineering application
> > environment. Your application will be glad to find the swrast renderer
> > that is finally
> > more capable than the 'GPU' mostly there to drive an administration
> > console.
> > You do not want to lock a swrast 'device' (or however you want to call it)
> > out by
> > a may be less capable 'console GPU'.
> >
> > Beside that having a second type of 'normalized renderer' like Eric was
> > telling
> > about is an other one.
> >
> > As well as sometimes it may make sense to utilize the GPU
> > with one set of work and a second GPU with an other set of work in
> > parallel.
> > When you only find a single gpu device in one box, you may be glad to find
> > a swrast device that you can make use of in parallel with the gpu without
> > the need
> > to put up different code paths in your application.
> >
> > May be I can come up with other cases, but thats the 5 minutes for now ...
> >
> > best
> >
> > Mathias
> >
> >
> >  

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