mesa: GLcore vs. swrast

[surfer]

Hello,
I've been using the GIT master versions of all X.org related software. Recently, the X server has been changed to use this 'swrast' driver instead of the old 'GLcore' one. As a result, now direct rendering is broken for me. Can somebody explain what this means? And how this is going to affect us radeon users?

[bridgman]

http://tirdc.livejournal.com/

Does the May 27 post (swrast error messages) match what you are seeing ? If so, might be a version mismatch rather than a deliberate change.

[agd5f]

swrast is basically a mesa 3D driver that uses the mesa sw rasterization methods exclusively. It looks and loads just like a real hw 3D driver only it's sw only. GLcore was not. The change allows us to have a common interface for loading 3D drivers in the X server and provides us with a sw only 3D driver that provides a nice base for a new hw 3D driver in that you can slowly replace the sw routines with the hw ones.

[surfer]

I appreciate your quick response. The important step I learned was:

Build X server with the master branch of mesa.
Use only the *_dri.so files from the r500-support branch. (don't use libGL.so, etc.)

Thanks.

[bridgman]

And the nice thing is that today you can just build the master branch of mesa and go; r500-support was merged in last night.

Just a reminder that you absolutely need the latest drm as well, since some functionality (checking # of pipelines in the GPU) was moved from mesa to DRM yesterday.