Bringing The R600 Gallium3D Driver Up To Speed

The R600 Gallium3D driver for ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 graphics cards is not yet in a state for testing by end-users unlike the R300 Gallium3D driver that is running great these days. However, it is slowly getting there.

Back in March we reported on the R600 shader compiler being worked on that is used by the R600 Gallium3D driver. Jerome Glisse continues to work on this driver known as "R600g" driver within his personal Mesa Git repository with commits every so often.

As this work has been going on over time in a separate Git repository and not the mainline Mesa repository, it's fallen behind with the latest changes to the Gallium3D interface. However, that isn't the case anymore thanks to work by Marek Olšák.

Marek has ported Jerome's R600 Gallium3D driver work to the latest Mesa / Gallium3D code-base, which changes over 1,000 lines of the driver's code in the process. The changes made to the R600g driver and to a small portion of its Gallium3D winsys is talked about in this mailing list message by Marek. This work will make it easier to mainline the R600g driver when the time comes.