Early Gallium3D Work Has Begun Around Apple's M1 GPU With New "AGX" Driver

[Guest]

Oh wow, this is impressive work. I know there's still a long way to go, but I'm seriously impressed by the progress they're making. Pretty sure she'll win some kind of computing award in the future, or hopefully she does.

[cmakeshift]

There's a lot of work to do with M1 GPU yet. Hope it won't end up like Nouveau.

Maybe, maybe not. Going through the developer's blog posts the GPU's architecture seems to be very clean, and the command streams seem to make sense. There may be some weird stuff going on under the hood with memory allocations, but quite frankly, whit the amount of stuff she has already accomplished, I wouldn't be surprised this driver ends up in a very good state.

Video decode and Vulkan are another story, though. Vulkan will be hard because of the synchronization primitives and weird memory management I guess. And video decode, well, because it's likely to be a mess, as it usually is. I'd love to her more from Alyssa, she would know the prospects better than anyone.

[pal666]

I would go with implementing Vulkan driver first just because Zink already exists in a pretty good shape. Not trying to diminish the merits with all that reverse engineering stuff - that's undoubtedly amazing job done. Just thinking out loud here.

"zink already exists" only because "gallium opengl frontend already exists", which is used by subj. zink provides no benefits without existence of imaginary good proprietary vulkan driver paired with absence of good opengl driver. in our real-world example hardware-specific bits don't exist and they have to be written and extra indirection via zink will not make this task easier

[pal666]

There's a lot of work to do with M1 GPU yet. Hope it won't end up like Nouveau.

one would hope more linux-friendly vendors will get more attention

[pal666]

programming is one of those things I can't teach myself from a book.

there are free university courses on online learning platforms

[pal666]

2. I am stupid

then i'd do the opposite of your suggestion

[pal666]

Going through the developer's blog posts the GPU's architecture seems to be very clean

are you implying that novideo gpu's architecture is not clean?

[skeevy420]

there are free university courses on online learning platforms

Most of those don't offer free 1:1(ish) teaching. While I can't speak for others, for me some things are easier to learn from an actual person. Sometimes you have a question but don't know the right words to do a quick search and figure it out so you end up doing 20-30 minutes of searching to read an answer for 10 minutes but it doesn't matter because that 30-40 minute sidetrack was enough to make you have to start over. Anyways, that's my problem.

It's like welding. You can read about it all you want but you'd be much better off with me or anyone else giving you a 5 minute primer and having your hand literally held for your first few welds so you get an idea on the motions and speed. Welding really isn't that hard. It's just patience and technique. Most people go way too fast.

TLDR: Having someone show you the motions in person is easier and more comprehensible than doing it from a written description or a video.

[schmidtbag]

Most of those don't offer free 1:1(ish) teaching. While I can't speak for others, for me some things are easier to learn from an actual person. Sometimes you have a question but don't know the right words to do a quick search and figure it out so you end up doing 20-30 minutes of searching to read an answer for 10 minutes but it doesn't matter because that 30-40 minute sidetrack was enough to make you have to start over. Anyways, that's my problem.

It's like welding. You can read about it all you want but you'd be much better off with me or anyone else giving you a 5 minute primer and having your hand literally held for your first few welds so you get an idea on the motions and speed. Welding really isn't that hard. It's just patience and technique. Most people go way too fast.

TLDR: Having someone show you the motions in person is easier and more comprehensible than doing it from a written description or a video.

I totally get what you're saying. For me, when having an instructor there isn't an option, my way of learning is to just simply start experimenting and breaking things. Obviously, only in an environment where you can afford to do so, and preferably not if you're getting paid in said environment.
All I ask is... don't begin learning with Java. It's fine if you eventually learn Java - I don't have a problem with that, but the way Java works results in people being trained to make programs in other languages unnecessarily complicated. I've programmed in various languages (C[++], python, PHP, shell, BASIC, javascript, and a few obscure languages) and I can always tell when someone learned programming through Java, because they needlessly shove everything into classes.