AMD Is Planning To Support GLVND For Easier Linux Driver Setup & Maintenance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Is Planning To Support GLVND For Easier Linux Driver Setup & Maintenance

The other follow-up question I received an answer to on Friday from AMD's media liaison was whether the company is looking at supporting the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library (GLVND) to make it easier to install and maintain their user-space GL driver on Linux systems...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Looking-At-GLVND

[Veske]

What does this GLVND mean for a simple end user? If I just use the xorg-edgers PPA for installing my drivers, will I be feeling any difference?

[mannerov]

As far as I understand libglvnd is all about asking the X server which driver to load.
This seems a bad idea to me, this is only going to mean more hacks in the xserver to have multi-gpu working correctly.
I really think we should avoid mixing more the driver and the xserver.

[jf33]

What we need is a working implementation of DRI_PRIME on systems with Intel IGP and radeonSI. So that the AMD graphics card gets shut down (using ZeroCore on desktop computers) when not needed. And with working v-sync. What is the current state of this?

[mannerov]

What we need is a working implementation of DRI_PRIME on systems with Intel IGP and radeonSI. So that the AMD graphics card gets shut down (using ZeroCore on desktop computers) when not needed. And with working v-sync. What is the current state of this?

Everything works (vsync, Zerocore, etc), except dma-buf fences (for synchronization read/write between the intel and amd cards). Intel promised years ago to do that with their "atomic rewrite", but they still didn't finish with it.

Gallium nine uses a workaround, and thus there everything works perfectly, but the workaround is more complicated to use for gl, and thus it hasn't been implemented.

[droste]

Do you guys even read the articles?

"Using libglvnd will ultimately simplify the Linux OpenGL driver installation and make it easier for multiple different OpenGL drivers to co-exist on the same system. With this new format, the different proprietary drivers won't overwrite each other nor cause havoc to the stock Mesa libraries. That is as long as the other prominent Linux OpenGL drivers also opt for the GLVND design."

This means it helps that you can have multiple drivers installed and they don't cripple another by overwriting libraries. Nothing else (well almost: It also installs a new library as an entry point for opengl users without the use of GLX, but that's just sugar on top ).

[cl333r]

As far as I understand libglvnd is all about asking the X server which driver to load.
This seems a bad idea to me, this is only going to mean more hacks in the xserver to have multi-gpu working correctly.
I really think we should avoid mixing more the driver and the xserver.

No, as mentioned multiple times, it's about fixing the old Linux OpenGL ABI (not API).
More info here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkVs64ggSzM

[jf33]

Everything works (vsync, Zerocore, etc), except dma-buf fences (for synchronization read/write between the intel and amd cards). Intel promised years ago to do that with their "atomic rewrite", but they still didn't finish with it.

Gallium nine uses a workaround, and thus there everything works perfectly, but the workaround is more complicated to use for gl, and thus it hasn't been implemented.

Thank you for the clarification! Will probably build such a system when Polaris comes out.

[boffo]

That's a good news.

[Uqbar]

Surely I am missing something. But why all this interest in advaced accelerated 3D graphics under Linux? I thought that 3D gaming share wasn't that big.