Experimental options

[Alex Deucher]

On Sat, 11 Dec 2004 03:52:14 -0500 (EST), Vladimir Dergachev
<volodya at mindspring.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
>      I would like to get some feedback on what people think
> about introducing "experimental" options in the video drivers
> and having a standardized way of marking them as such.
> 
>      In particular, I thought about classifying as "experimental"
> any options that turn on behaviour that can result in lockup or
> breakage of standard protocols.
> 
>      I would propose that all such options be prefixed with "X_"
> and default of "false" (for obvious reasons). It'd be nice to have
> a webpage (and/or README) that explains that all options starting
> with "X_" are experimental and users turn them on at their own risk.
> 
>      For example, I would like to add an option to radeon driver
> to enable 3d for R300 cards with non-existent "r300_dri.so" mesa driver.
> The reason this is useful is that such trick greatly accelerates 3d on
> large resolution screens as 2d driver can also use DRM driver and this
> works perfectly well. This also facilitates work on 3d driver.
> 
>      The 2d speedup is quite considerable, however one would expect all GL
> apps to break because of this, as even software rendering won't work.
> 

we ought to also use the drm for radeon and r200 even if there's not
enough memory/etc. for 3d so that we can take advantage for the speed
increases for 2d.

Alex

>      Again, such feature would be disabled in default configuration.
> 
>      So what does everyone think ?
> 
>                          best
> 
>                            Vladimir Dergachev