Gallium3D For Haiku Is Being Addressed

It turns out that a developer is bringing Mesa's Gallium3D driver support to Haiku -- the operating system that seeks to re-implement BeOS as open-source -- per an outstanding monetary bounty.

Back in December I mentioned Haiku OS was looking towards mainline Mesa support as right now they are using a heavily-modified Mesa 7.4. It turns out the developer working on this mainline Mesa support also has plans to provide Gallium3D support under Haiku.

Going back to 2009 some Haiku developers have looked toward Gallium3D support and in 2010 hoped for a new 3D stack via Google Summer of Code. Nothing happened then in January of 2011 a bounty for Gallium3D support was issued. Nothing immediately materialized, but now it looks like a developer is taking a stab at finally bringing this graphics driver architecture to Haiku.

The developer that accepted this $2,000 USD bounty work is Alexander von Gluck. Alexander is already a BeOS developer and has been responsible for the ATI/AMD graphics driver support on BeOS, so at least he's experienced and stands a good chance of succeeding.

As part of this bounty, he wants to get Mesa/Gallium3D building using a stock/upstream install, ensure that OpenGL rendering works along with software rendering, and then get at least one Gallium3D hardware driver working. After one Gallium3D hardware driver is working/rendering, he will also take a stab at getting a second driver working -- R300g and Nouveau? R300g and R600g? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Acceptance of the Haiku Gallium3D bounty is mentioned on Haikuware.com. Alexander has since typed his first bounty update. His first step is to get upstream Mesa building. The patches he got upstream back in December were just related to build system support for Haiku, but not much more.

Besides the obvious differences between Haiku/BeOS and Linux, he also needs to get Mesa/Gallium3D building under GCC2 (yes, the GCC 2.x series that's still in use by Haiku OS).