Direct3D State Tracker Will Not Be Open-Source

[Adarion]

Especially when that means that they can boost performance for a e.g. virtualized W32. I mean after all vmware has to deal with all kinds of operating systems, competitors or not.

[airlied]

Hm, since VMWare is a direct competitor to MS, that's not very likely. They directly compete against them in the virtualization market.

That doesn't matter, lots of companies have NDAs with competitors in specific areas. Competition doesn't mean you don't have to cooperate sometimes.

[RealNC]

I am quite sure they have an NDA with MS. Wouldn't have happened so quickly otherwise I guess. So that would mean, commercial use or not there'd still be an NDA.

Hm, since VMWare is a direct competitor to MS, that's not very likely. They directly compete against them in the virtualization market.

[Adarion]

If someone wants to have an open source dx tracker he could build it ... and it's not said, that vmware won't opensource this driver after a while ... when the commercial benefit of closed source is gone they have no need or interst to keep it closed.

I am quite sure they have an NDA with MS. Wouldn't have happened so quickly otherwise I guess. So that would mean, commercial use or not there'd still be an NDA.
Still sad I would have hoped that this could've been used by wine excessively so wine would just need to "correct" the behaviour of w32 progs in terms of everything else. Which would cost probably far less performance that the DX->OpenGl transaltions.
But then I'm not a developer and know little about all that.

[mtippett]

A state tracker is an implementation term for the Gallium architecture. To the outside world Gallium is just a driver that has different flavours expressed by the state tracker. Or put another way, the gallium bottom half + the state tracker is a XXX driver. So under windows, you have a common bottom half and a top half that varies from driver flavor to flavor.

The end result is that instead of having a full D3D9, D3D10, D3D11, OpenCL and OpenGL driver, you have a single Gallium bottom half, as well considerably smaller top layers.

Although I don't know for sure, I would expect that the model that they are taking is having a Gallium bottom half that allows vmware to jump out to the host system. Then VMWare will just be a GL accelerated client on the host that will allow close to full speed HW acceleration for all the GPU clients within any number of guests.

Kind of like VMGL (http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~andreslc/xen-gl/ ).

Regards,

Matthew

[mbouchar]

Direct3D is a closed source library on top of a hardware driver. ATI and nVidia are implementing a driver that is used by the library. A Direct3D state tracker would probably not re-implement the complete Direct3D library, so this state tracker would be windows only.

[rohcQaH]

Since the D3D state tracker Zack is talking about is Windows-dependent,

it's not, but D3D-apps are windows-dependant in ways that gallium cannot solve. Hence it'd be absolutely useless to run the D3D state tracker on linux. Even Wine doesn't want one.

Still, closed source? I guess they're afraid that virtualbox/KVM/others use G3D for 3d-accelerated windows guests, thus stealing vmware's new killer feature. That's only fair after vmware spent all the money, but still sad.

[Ragas]

If someone wants to have an open source dx tracker he could build it ... and it's not said, that vmware won't opensource this driver after a while ... when the commercial benefit of closed source is gone they have no need or interst to keep it closed.

[waucka]

Isn't a Gallium3D state tracker supposed to be OS-independent? Since the D3D state tracker Zack is talking about is Windows-dependent, I suspect it contains all sorts of badness.

[wswartzendruber]

So is Windows considered its own Winsys?