Gentoo Developers, Users Look At Gaming Future

One of the events being co-hosted alongside LinuxDays is a Gentoo mini-conference. A session held this morning concerned the state of Linux 3D graphics drivers and gaming for Gentoo Linux.

David Heidelberger, a Gentoo user and contributor, entitled his talk "3D, games and everything about Graphic performance under Linux/Gentoo." In the half-hour talk he briefly went over the Linux graphics driver architecture, setting up the graphics drivers on a Gentoo system with its configuration system, a few steps for building Wine to be more performant under Gentoo, and a few comments about the future with regards to Wayland and Steam.

If you read Phoronix regularly, there wasn't anything new to really share aside from the Gentoo-specific configuration items. It was just a very quick overview and most upstream graphics developers would despise the information being tossed about: making it sound like EGL is only a temporary need for Wayland / EGL isn't the platform API solution (contrary to upstream wanting to deprecate GLX, others moving towards EGL, and Intel only recommending EGL), etc. Even the now-disabled Gallium3D Direct3D state tracker was mentioned as a possible future item for Gentoo Linux gaming.

Gentoo Linux users are also getting excited about Steam Linux prospects and the future of playing Source Engine games natively on their favorite rolling-release distribution. David Heidelberger thinks Gentoo Linux could be a great gaming platform in about one year's time. Meanwhile, Ubuntu is also trying to become a great Linux gaming platform.