R600 Gallium3D Driver Is Now Built By Default

Marek Olšák, the open-source community developer known for his contributions to Mesa / Gallium3D and to the Radeon driver in particular, has submitted a set of patches to the Mesa mailing list. This time around, these patches overhaul the Gallium3D configure/build-time options. These patches are meant to make it easier to configure Gallium3D with the Gallium3D EGL support and in automatically determining what state trackers to build. In addition, there is one prominent change in default behavior.

In ending his email message that describes the set of six patches, Marek adds, "Other than that, I am enabling r600g by default and removing r300g and r600g from scons. I am not a fan of having multiple build systems and most people prefer autoconf anyway. It's not like anybody needs to build those drivers on Windows." Yep, R600g is now being built by default!

To most Phoronix readers that compile their own Mesa builds have likely already been using the R600 Gallium3D driver, including those using modern installations of Fedora and Ubuntu (among other distributions) it's already been the default for the recent releases, will not notice a change. Those noticing a change will just be those that strictly use the default build-time options or are just very conservative with your choices, now it's time to enter the Gallium3D world for the Radeon HD 2000 series and newer. The R600g driver supports the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000/6000 series and the Fusion APU hardware at this time.

For several months now the "R600g" Gallium3D driver has performed better and surpassed the feature-set offered by the "R600c" classic Mesa driver. There really isn't any reason to be sticking with the classic Mesa R600 driver any longer when using the modern Mesa stack.

It was several months ago that the "R300g" driver became part of the default Mesa build to replace the classic R300 driver for ATI Radeon graphics cards up through the X1000 (R500) series.

Marek's other configure option changes include automatically enabling Gallium3D EGL when the generic --enable-egl switch is enabled and a Gallium3D driver is built, and to removing the --with-state-trackers argument to instead automatically deduce the state trackers to build based upon the other API switches.

These changes should be found in Mesa 7.11, which will be officially released in July.