The State Of Gallium3D, Its Future, Etc

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The State Of Gallium3D, Its Future, Etc

VMware hosted a Gallium3D workshop today at its headquarters in California (and via teleconference too) where the former Tungsten Graphics developers talked about all that they have been working on with Gallium3D, the current state of this graphics driver architecture, and what's to come. The biggest news coming out of this workshop is word that a virtual Gallium3D driver is coming, which will allow Gallium3D to run within a virtualized environment...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzcwNg

[Yfrwlf]

"The biggest news coming out of this workshop is word that a virtual Gallium3D driver is coming, which will allow Gallium3D to run within a virtualized environment. It's looking like there will be this Gallium3D driver that can run within a VMware guest virtual machine and then take advantage of the state trackers on the host machine whether it be providing hardware-acceleration for OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenVG, OpenCL, etc."

Meaning that there will also be Virtualbox support I assume, too, since this is a general Gallium3D feature applicable to anything? If so, why is VMWare specifically mentioned, and what about VBox?

[RealNC]

Originally Posted by Yfrwlf

Meaning that there will also be Virtualbox support I assume, too, since this is a general Gallium3D feature applicable to anything? If so, why is VMWare specifically mentioned, and what about VBox?

It's a VMWare driver. VBox can't do anything with them.

[d2kx]

Gallium3D is some serious business.

[DanL]

Among other topics, Brian Paul was talking to how he wants support for OpenGL 3.x within Mesa, but the support will likely be just atop Gallium3D and that the VMware developers will not be worrying about proper OpenGL 3.x support for Mesa's legacy drivers. Though on the other side of the table, Intel developers have been wanting to push OpenGL 3.0 support into Mesa for their current driver

That's kind of troubling. I wonder how long it will be until intel hops on the bullet train that is Gallium3D.

[zoomblab]

Some of this work includes shader improvements, predicate rendering, and other changes that will lead to substantial revisions to the Gallium3D driver interface. The GLSL compiler also needs to be improved too...

...work on the Open Computing Language support is basically stalled for the time being. What's needed before work can continue is support for translating LLVM to TGSI and then integer and double support is still a ways out for OpenCL atop Gallium3D. Before any VMware developers continue work on this portion, it was shared that "there are a few more things in the pipeline first"...

...the OpenGL ES 1.0/1.1/2.0 state tracker should be merged to Mesa's master code-base in January. With Mesa 7.7 coming by Christmas, this state tracker will likely end up in Mesa 7.8.

In other words, don't hold your breath with this project. There is serious work remaining and that doesn't even include the drivers. I would estimate some good 2-3 years before this thing could start touching end users.

[Louise]

Can someone translate what this will mean for the end user that doesn't use vmware?

Will vmware's Gallium work benefit regular desktop users?

[bridgman]

The specific "virtual SVGA" Gallium3D driver used to run on the VMWare virtual hardware will not directly benefit end users not running VMWare, but it was clear from the technical session that a lot of hard work is going into all of the *other* aspects of the stack built around Gallium3D (OpenGL, Xorg, OpenVG, OpenCL, OpenGL ES among others) and all of *that* work *will* directly benefit other users in the form of a more polished framework.

[Louise]

Originally Posted by bridgman

The specific "virtual SVGA" Gallium3D driver used to run on the VMWare virtual hardware will not directly benefit end users not running VMWare, but it was clear from the technical session that a lot of hard work is going into all of the *other* aspects of the stack built around Gallium3D (OpenGL, Xorg, OpenVG, OpenCL, OpenGL ES among others) and all of *that* work *will* directly benefit other users in the form of a more polished framework.

Cool! Thanks for breaking it down

[smitty3268]

The way I understand it, vmware's video driver will pass along calls to the virtual machine, which will in turn pass along those calls to a state tracker running on the host machine rather than on the guest.

What's key there, is that the 3D is still running on a Gallium state tracker. Which means that it's in VMWare's best interest to make it all work well on the host machine. And they seem to be putting in quite a bit of work to that end, which will help out everyone else.