AMD on Gallium3D?

[EmbraceUnity]

What sort of work would need to be done to port the radeonhd or ati driver to Gallium3d?

It seems like nearly all the development is going into these drivers, and it would be somewhat of a waste if none of the work can be used for the Gallium3d drivers.

Would the new driver just have to be written from scratch? I did hear that Jerome Glisse created a skeleton ati gallium3d driver awhile back. Has any work been done on improving it? Where can it be obtained?

[agd5f]

What sort of work would need to be done to port the radeonhd or ati driver to Gallium3d?

It seems like nearly all the development is going into these drivers, and it would be somewhat of a waste if none of the work can be used for the Gallium3d drivers.

Would the new driver just have to be written from scratch? I did hear that Jerome Glisse created a skeleton ati gallium3d driver awhile back. Has any work been done on improving it? Where can it be obtained?

Neither radeon nor radeonhd have anything to do with gallium or 3D drivers. radeon and radeonhd handle modesetting and 2D and video accel. 3D is handled by a mesa 3D driver. The mesa r300 3D driver could be used for a base to create a gallium driver if you were so inclined.

[duby229]

Neither radeon nor radeonhd have anything to do with gallium or 3D drivers. radeon and radeonhd handle modesetting and 2D and video accel. 3D is handled by a mesa 3D driver. The mesa r300 3D driver could be used for a base to create a gallium driver if you were so inclined.

What is the inclination of the devs working on it? In other words clearly memory management, but then what?

[sundown]

Then... a graphical installer

[duby229]

Then... a graphical installer

package management...

[sundown]

Well, John mentioned some sort of an installer once (if I remember correctly).

[elanthis]

There is absolutely no need for an installer. Once everything is actually done, it'll just be a standard part of every distro from that point forward... and likely won't work with older distros due to having an older kernel that lacks all of the necessary DRI/DRI2/DRM/GEM/KMS stuff that is required.

NVIDIA and ATI put a lot of work into installers for their proprietary drivers because those drivers don't come installed by default on the vast majority of distributions, and they don't want to maintain the RPMs/DEBs/etc. for every version of every variation of every distro out there. Most users don't even use the installers for those drivers anymore either, though, since it's just so much safer to use the third-party packages from sites like Livna.

Someone might want to hack together a script to download and build all the necessary components straight from the repos -- or just create a jhbuild config for it all -- but that would just be a temporary need for the few testers not running Rawhide or the equivalent, and not worth any kind of significant effort.