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LLVMpipe Gallium3D Driver Now Exposes OpenGL 4.0

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  • #11
    Michael please avoid using the word compliance in association with OpenGL/Vulkan and any mesa driver that hasn't passed official opengl compliance and is listed in the compliance database. Compliance means something with OpenGL. LLVMPIPE is *NOT* OpenGL 4.0 complaint, it exposes OpenGL 4.0 and is compatible with it.

    I do plan on submitting llvmpipe for compliance in the future, but that is still some time off.

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    • #12
      Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
      It's not like it's just checking for the feature to be supported, it's actually doing something with it.
      Especially on hardware that is so old (or is an embedded device) it does not support OpenGL 2.1, the CPU isn't really THAT powerful.
      The honest answer to that is it shouldn't be doing doing something with it. It is a desktop environment. It launches programs. Leave the GPU fiddling to CAD and games.

      Actually it is also a little bit of a double whammy. The Intel GMA 945 *did* provide OpenGL 2.1 until they removed support in the driver. Their reasons were to reduce the amount of code to maintain and "it was mostly all emulation anyway".

      Unfortunately this had the effect of Gnome 3 suddenly not working. Now it all needs to be done with LLVMpipe. The Intel Core Duo on that same Thinkpad is actually a fairly neat CPU (even if it is 32bit) but doing the rendering for an entire overblown desktop environment just makes it too hot for a "laptop". Gnome 3 really needs some features to eliminate all GPU-guzzling effects like on Windows.
      Last edited by kpedersen; 02 July 2020, 03:05 PM.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by kpedersen View Post
        The honest answer to that
        is that a GPU is more efficient than CPU for rendering, and anything remotely modern follows the same idea.

        Android for example is always 2D and 3D accelerated, because it makes no sense to waste the CPU on something the GPU can do better, for less power.

        Actually it is also a little bit of a double whammy. The Intel GMA 945 *did* provide OpenGL 2.1 until they removed support in the driver. Their reasons were to reduce the amount of code to maintain and "it was mostly all emulation anyway".
        GMA hardware never supported more than 2.0. The windows driver never supported more than 2.0

        You know it is supposed to be a graphics driver, aka expose what the hardware is capable of, not just lie about it and run all on a beefy CPU.

        Unfortunately this had the effect of Gnome 3 suddenly not working.
        Yeah, instead of GNOME running like absolute shit and CPU getting hammered by random spikes of activity when I operate a GUI, what a huge loss.
        I had a netbook with that graphics, I know how it was.

        Now it all needs to be done with LLVMpipe. The Intel Core Duo on that same Thinkpad is actually a fairly neat CPU (even if it is 32bit)
        It sure would beat the Atom of my netbook I guess, maybe it was good enough to fake-OpenGL for GNOME.

        Gnome 3 really needs some features to eliminate all GPU-guzzling effects like on Windows.
        Why would it? As time goes on, the hardware that can't run it is decreasing, not increasing.

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        • #14
          Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
          is that a GPU is more efficient than CPU for rendering, and anything remotely modern follows the same idea.
          Yep but if you don't do superfluous rendering effects (i.e like most other desktop environments), then that is even more efficient, regardless of CPU or GPU doing the work

          Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
          Why would it? As time goes on, the hardware that can't run it is decreasing, not increasing.
          With the advent of virtualization, cloud, remote work and accessible hardware like the Raspberry Pi, I would actually say the opposite is true. Sure, you can get powerful hardware but now there is a lot more "weaker" hardware or platforms that people want to work with too. Gnome only targets a niche segment which is not what I would expect from a desktop that people seem to claim is "the standard desktop".

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          • #15
            Originally posted by kpedersen View Post

            The honest answer to that is it shouldn't be doing doing something with it. It is a desktop environment. It launches programs. Leave the GPU fiddling to CAD and games.

            Actually it is also a little bit of a double whammy. The Intel GMA 945 *did* provide OpenGL 2.1 until they removed support in the driver. Their reasons were to reduce the amount of code to maintain and "it was mostly all emulation anyway".

            Unfortunately this had the effect of Gnome 3 suddenly not working. Now it all needs to be done with LLVMpipe. The Intel Core Duo on that same Thinkpad is actually a fairly neat CPU (even if it is 32bit) but doing the rendering for an entire overblown desktop environment just makes it too hot for a "laptop". Gnome 3 really needs some features to eliminate all GPU-guzzling effects like on Windows.
            I just registered to phoronix to answer this.

            you need to add something to your .drirc

            If you see this line:
            https://gitlab.com/bminor/mesa-mesa/...screen.c#L1112

            you need to add:

            fragment_shader
            and
            stub_occlusion_query

            and the driver will expose again openGL 2.1 that is what I did on my old i915.

            a better tutorial is on Arch documentation:
            https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...th_i915_driver

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            • #16
              Originally posted by kpedersen View Post
              Yep but if you don't do superfluous rendering effects (i.e like most other desktop environments), then that is even more efficient, regardless of CPU or GPU doing the work

              With the advent of virtualization, cloud, remote work and accessible hardware like the Raspberry Pi, I would actually say the opposite is true. Sure, you can get powerful hardware but now there is a lot more "weaker" hardware or platforms that people want to work with too. Gnome only targets a niche segment which is not what I would expect from a desktop that people seem to claim is "the standard desktop".
              Gnome disables effects by default for remote connection (since 3.36 or so). Also the gnome team makes performance improvements for that use cases, e.g. using shadow fbs etc. (1,2 - both from Olivier Fourdan, founder of the XFCE project by the way).

              Given that the lowest requirement for GS is GLES 2.0, the Raspberry Pi 3 and up should be fine - all new GPUs, even if low power, support newer GL versions. So the only hardware that has problems with the GL requirements of GS are *old* GPUs (>= 10 years), making up only a very small part of the user base.

              1: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutte...e_requests/877
              2: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutte...e_requests/809
              Last edited by treba; 02 July 2020, 08:30 PM.

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              • #17
                Originally posted by kpedersen View Post
                Yep but if you don't do superfluous rendering effects (i.e like most other desktop environments), then that is even more efficient, regardless of CPU or GPU doing the work
                Even without effects and shadows it will still need OpenGL anyway, why bother removing them.
                Welcome to the land of diminshing returns. You are waking the GPU anyway because the GUI is hardware-accelerated, running some shadows and a trasparency on top does not change the overall power consumption.

                there is a lot more "weaker" hardware or platforms that people want to work with too.
                No there is not.

                I already told you, the drivers for these "weaker" hardware suck balls because of the usual reasons.
                Anything embedded has a integrated GPU that supports GLES 2.0 so it can run GNOME (and KDE), but they ship a blob driver that can't be used outside of a specific hacked Android kernel.

                Gnome only targets a niche segment
                no it does not, the only thing it is not targeting is old crap that is used by a minority of people.

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                • #18
                  Originally posted by mercuriete View Post

                  I just registered to phoronix to answer this.

                  you need to add something to your .drirc
                  That is a very neat trick. Thank you! Performance is better than entirely using LLVMpipe!

                  Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
                  I already told you, the drivers for these "weaker" hardware suck balls because of the usual reasons.
                  And yet only Gnome is the one that struggles to run on them.
                  Last edited by kpedersen; 03 July 2020, 05:42 AM.

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                  • #19
                    Just to chime in here: it's not all old hardware. I have a server motherboard for Ryzen (Asrock Rack X470 D4U2-2T) that comes with a BMC chip (AST2500) that provides simple graphics. I'm pretty sure it has no 3D hardware acceleration at all. So the machine has a modern, powerful processor, but no GL at all. If gnome really needs GL, llvmpipe is probably quite a good solution for this problem (seldomly doing administrative tasks using a gui via VNC is a use case for me).

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                    • #20
                      What llvmpipe exposes is not my concern. The real issue here is performance.

                      I was setting up two Windows 10 installations yesterday, one on a Skylake laptop with the standard Intel iGPU, the other on an Athlon 3000G with enbedded Vega graphics. Even without the GPU drivers, the Windows 10 GUI was able to fun at full speed with all those transparency and fade effects.

                      On the other hand, Gnome 3 and Plasma Wayland were practically unusable on my dual-Xeon monster with 48 processor cores under llvmpipe.

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