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

[Krejzi]

Now that libglvnd is getting mentioned again, it appears that mesa got an RFC implementation back in September, but nobody even responded to that mail!

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2015-September/095856.html

[computerquip]

There's a few things that will always bother me in the graphics industry.

New technology comes out all the time. For instance, GLVND is relatively new... but not so new that AMD couldn't have looked at it literally a year ago and started a reference implementation themselves. GLVND is finally ready for use by Nvidia after 2 years and AMD just now is saying, "I guess we should look into it maybe".

For once AMD... I just want you to be feature ready in a competitive amount of time to nVidia. You make it so frickin' difficult to buy your hardware when you know any new technology is going to be a year or two behind your competition with less performance.


/rant

[BenPope]

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.

Chicken, egg situation. (I know we know the answer now).

[monraaf]

Does mesa actually support GLVND yet? I haven't heard about specific efforts to that goal. So what's the matter with GLVND if *only* one driver (nvidia blob) supports it?

[jf33]

If I understand it correctly, Nvidia is the only vendor that needs GLVND, isn't it? All other vendors have good mesa drivers.

[monraaf]

The issue is that all drivers compete about who provides /usr/lib/libGL.so. Mine is a symlink to mesa. nvidia (without GLVND) installs one that points to the blob.

With GLVND /usr/lib/libGL.so is a vendor neutral library that dynamically calls into the right vendor libGL (without playing games with the /usr/lib/libGL.so file).

[computerquip]

If I understand it correctly, Nvidia is the only vendor that needs GLVND, isn't it? All other vendors have good mesa drivers.

Mesa doesn't seem to give a shit about GLVND yet which is yet another face palm in the OSS community. There was a reference implementation some time ago which got the same treatment as various other contributions: ignored and provided no feedback or support.

[tarceri]

Mesa doesn't seem to give a shit about GLVND yet which is yet another face palm in the OSS community. There was a reference implementation some time ago which got the same treatment as various other contributions: ignored and provided no feedback or support.

Emil from Collabora is working on the Mesa support on behalf of Intel. He also has provided feedback along the way, so not sure what you are talking about.

[bulletxt]

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.

Industry and developers want to become Windows free. It won't happen today or tomorrow but in 5-6 years things may be very different.

[Uqbar]

Industry and developers want to become Windows free. It won't happen today or tomorrow but in 5-6 years things may be very different.

It's not a chicken and egg thing in my opinion.
And the gaming won't be windows free that soon.
If nvidia/amd want to conquer the Linux world they need to fully open source the drivers. And they have no reason to.
Because Linux gaming is marginal.
And, because of fragmentation (half a dozen mainstream distributions) and because of unclear mid-term planning (a-la Fedora and Ubuntu), vendors don't feel the push for investments in the Linux arena.
I would like to suggest Linux devs to focus on market defragmentation and reliability of planned releases.