Gallium3D's Direct3D 10/11 State Tracker To Be Nuked

The Direct3D state tracker for Gallium3D that for a short time provided hope of a native Direct3D implementation for Linux of the Microsoft Direct3D 10/11 APIs without simply being a translator layer to OpenGL, is set to be nuked from mainline Mesa.

The Direct3D Gallium3D implementation was published back in 2010 and provided hope of support for the Microsoft graphics API on Linux. It worked to some extent and could even be hooked into Wine. Among Wine developers though, there were mixed feelings about the D3D state tracker since it was rather Linux-specific and bound to using the Mesa Gallium3D hardware drivers. There's also legal uncertainty concerning this state tracker for implementing the Microsoft API.

In the past two and a half years, the Direct3D state tracker fell into bit-rot and was disabled by default from building last year. Without any real users of the state tracker, Mesa developers aren't really motivated to support its continued existence.

This morning Jose Fonseca of VMware proposed a patch to eliminate the D3D1X code outright.

This trims over 27,000 lines of code from Mesa for this state tracker that's no longer really being used. Of course, it can be obtained from Git and earlier Mesa releases should anyone want to revive the Direct3D on Linux support.

The Direct3D state tracker is set to go the way of Chernobyl... From the Phoronix tour of Chernobyl in 2010.

Christoph Bumiller of Nouveau did write a follow-up message to the Monday morning patch about earlier capabilities of this D3D1X state tracker.

This one *did* kind of work, notably also with wine, but it still has loads of bugs and I just don't have the time to improve it; and then add those missing bits like deferred contexts, virtual functions, compute shader or UAV support. Also gallium's still not completely able to support everything properly. It did acquire some of the missing parts though since last time I touched it.

I had succeeded in making Unigine Heaven run (taking a little shortcut with sm4 to nv50, extending the gallium interface for features like tessellation that are still years ahead for all the other parties would not have been well received at that time, at least I had that impression), but all the more complex games I tested crashed somewhere and I wasn't going to try to debug binary blobs (most of them seemed to require those missing features, too).

Anyway, just meant to say, it *could* have been useful had someone finished it ... if only with wine. So I'm fine with removing it since I don't expect anyone to get back to it. Trying to decide between "farewell" and "good riddance" for all the pain its bugs caused me.