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Whoops, ATI's Evergreen Will Bring A New Driver

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  • #61
    Originally posted by Veerappan View Post
    Yes, it does. I have a Radeon 4770 in my desktop at home and Ubuntu 10.04 has hardware-accelerated 3D via Mesa. Compiz is working, suspend/resume is working, native games (the one's that I've bothered benchmarking using PTS) are working.
    Ty!



    <blablablamessagelimitblablabla>

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    • #62
      what?

      Originally posted by smitty3268 View Post
      To make it a little simpler, which of these (completely made up) scenarios makes more sense:

      1. Work 1 week on refactoring the classic driver to include r800 register offsets. Then work 3 weeks trying to get the 3D hardware actually working. Then port everything over to Gallium, throwing away the refactoring work you did.

      2. Work 4 weeks trying to get the 3D hardware working. Then port everything over to Gallium.
      why would you throw away stuff in scenario 1? I don't see that. I fact, I think this scenario is the best reflection of reality: r800 differs only (mainly) in register offsets. it actually exploits the major similarities in the chips.

      If you loose stuff in 1 then you'll also loose the same stuff in 2...

      beside, if classic mesa driver can be unified for r300-evergreen then a gallium driver can probably also be unified!

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      • #63
        Originally posted by bridgman View Post
        Again, the only reason doing this makes sense is if there *is* no future, ie if we move from "classic" to Gallium3D drivers which would be a different code base anyways.

        If it turns out that we need to stay with the classic mesa drivers for a while then we probably would want to merge 6xx/7xx with Evergreen and later, but *after* the initial working code is in a public repo and in users hands.
        there is no future? there's always a future: maintenance of the driver! I have learned to never underestimate that effort: every project stage increases software effort 10-fold... Any reuse will pay itself back very quickly...

        Even now I have very strange and unreproduceable weirdness in my T60 laptop with X1400: sometimes the gfx get into a state where the whole system goes into major stutter mode: work for .1 second, hang for 1 second, repeat. Switching to text mode (KMS enabled) and switching back to gfx mode usually fixes it. Once someone fixes this bug it must be applied over multiple drivers in your copy scenario. wouldn't it be better if it were only 1 driver? :-)

        if classic mesa driver can be unified for r300-evergreen then a gallium driver can probably also be unified!

        anyway, I really appreciate the work you and the rest of the guys are doing. you're interaction with the community is wonderful, keep up the good work!

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        • #64
          But... but... the classic mesa driver is *not* unified that way today. The r300 driver covers 3xx, 4xx, 5xx and the r600 driver covers 6xx, 7xx and (maybe) Evergreen. There are no plans to merge the r300 and r600, either in classic or Gallium3d form.

          Again, all we're saying here is that burning cycles to keep Evergreen in the same "classic" driver as 6xx/7xx only makes sense if we do *not* move to a Gallium3D driver, since the G3D driver would be structured differently anyways. The only thing that's different now is that we separated out the "get Evergreen support running" work from the "make a merged driver" step, which lets Evergreen support get out faster and avoids investing time in a maintainable classic driver if we're going to jump across to Gallium3D immediately anyways.
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          • #65
            Originally posted by fhuberts View Post
            there is no future? there's always a future: maintenance of the driver! I have learned to never underestimate that effort: every project stage increases software effort 10-fold... Any reuse will pay itself back very quickly...
            Sure, but the point is that we may not be maintaining *that* driver. I agree completely that investing in improving maintainability of the driver we are going to maintain is a Good Thing, but it's not decided yet whether the driver we maintain is going to be the "classic" one we use to deliver initial support or the Gallium3D one.
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            • #66
              Originally posted by bridgman View Post
              Sure, but the point is that we may not be maintaining *that* driver. I agree completely that investing in improving maintainability of the driver we are going to maintain is a Good Thing, but it's not decided yet whether the driver we maintain is going to be the "classic" one we use to deliver initial support or the Gallium3D one.
              Start a poll here ...
              (Just an idea)

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              • #67
                Personally, I think doing solid ground and then building there is better, than maintaining both "houses" half-alive. Time passes, new generations come out...

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                • #68
                  Originally posted by crazycheese View Post
                  Start a poll here ...
                  (Just an idea)
                  I would vote for getting the code out in the open as soon as possible. I guess that probably means a separate dri driver for Evergreen.

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                  • #69
                    Wow, it's amazing how many armchair coders we have here at phoronix. Everyone seems to think the driver developers are really stupid...

                    I'm not saying whether it's the best plan or not, I really am not in any position to know. But I do trust the actual developers to make the right decision. This isn't rocket science, code duplication and the tradeoffs involved here are pretty basic stuff when it comes to software management.

                    Anyway, to the people talking about keeping both houses alive, or maintaining this in the future, you're completely missing the point. Which is that this copied driver will be deleted in a month, that it's a private experimental driver that will never be supported by anyone. You guys would never have even heard of this if bridgman hadn't announced it, it just would have been another branch of code that came and went silently.

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                    • #70
                      V!ncent, if you want to prove you have accel, post Xorg.0.log instead.

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