Gallium3D Status Update Q1'08

This afternoon at FOSDEM 2008 in the X,Org development room, Tungsten Graphics' Keith Whitwell had provided a status update on the Gallium3D graphics driver architecture followed by Jerome Glisse talking about his work in porting the Radeon driver from DRM to Gallium3D. Jerome had also commented on other Radeon/X.Org topics such as kernel mode-setting. In this article are Gallium3D notes from these two talks.

Below are a few notes from Keith Whitwell's talk, some items more interesting than others and listed in no particular order.

- Building and using Gallium3D drivers is still difficult and undocumented, but will be changing soon.

- Since Gallium3D was introduced last year by Tungsten Graphics, two external groups have started working on Gallium3D drivers: Nouveau and Jerome Glisse's Radeon driver.

- Gallium3D is starting to stabilize... Some more interface breakage will come though.

- Right now it's more or less an "alpha" state.

- Hasn't been tracking X.Org and DRM changes, but will re-base against X.Org and DRM head in the near term.

- Later will come DRI2 integration.

- Gallium3D developers will be shifting their focus to performance, conformance and correctness, and stabilization.

- On the road-map for the near future is simplifying the TGSI (Tungsten Graphics Shader Intefrastructure) representation.

- Bringing 3D graphics to Sony's PlayStation 3 using a Gallium3D Cell driver. Right now it supports simple Mesa demos and basic texturing. The first triangle was rendered in December 2007 using the Gallium3D driver on the PlayStation 3. Coming soon is support for shaders and improved performance.

- Support for no fallbacks.

- Most of the evolution to date has happened in the Gallium3D "winsys" layer.