Impressed by Nouveau Gallium3d

[pingufunkybeat]

Nouveau has to map the shared part of the OpenGL implementation to the hardware, and they are having a very hard time doing this because Nvidia is refusing to help them in any way (not even to let them see the documentation under NDAs).

They have my respect for the important work they are doing, but they have a very hard job in front of them.

[bridgman]

I get that but nouveau isn't fully exploiting all of the extensions is it?

It's mostly common Mesa code that implements extensions, not the HW-specific Gallium3D driver. The Gallium3D driver implements a standard set of drawing and shader functions which are used by the upper layers of Mesa.

This is a bit different from the "classic" Mesa HW driver interface, which corresponded more closely to specific OpenGL functionality. The Gallium3D driver API is an attempt to abstract out a modern shader-based GPU in a way that multiple APIs can be built on top via API-specific state trackers.

[Svartalf]

This is a bit different from the "classic" Mesa HW driver interface, which corresponded more closely to specific OpenGL functionality. The Gallium3D driver API is an attempt to abstract out a modern shader-based GPU in a way that multiple APIs can be built on top via API-specific state trackers.

Of which, it should be observed that this is roughly how NVidia and your employer do things within their drivers as well. There's a reason I'm eagerly waiting for the fruits of this little endeavor.

[Prescience500]

Has anyone calculated or charted the rate of progress on open source drivers, especially with Gallium3d, relative to the rate of progress on proprietary drivers to see if the open source drivers are gaining on the proprietary ones, and by how much?