What Was Decided With S3TC & Floating Points For Mesa

[TheCycoONE]

Maybe I just didn't read enough of the discussion, but has anyone said anything against putting this stuff behind the --enable-patented configure option and why not?

I thought the article did a reasonably good job. The floating point work apparently causes performance regressions, and s3tc is already more convenient as an optional shared object.

[mdias]

Maybe I just didn't read enough of the discussion, but has anyone said anything against putting this stuff behind the --enable-patented configure option and why not?

[FireBurn]

Obviously the opposite, what else?
Also, don't feel offended if someone corrects you when you write yourself that you may be wrong...

I don't mind being corrected, saying "Wrong" isn't a correction though

Thanks for the dlopen() info the reason I was confused was one of the previous articles comments mentioned having to rebuild mesa

[Veerappan]

The S3TC library doesn't have to be present at compile time. You can compile it after compiling Mesa, and Mesa dynamically loads it somehow. It's linked at runtime rather than compile time. I think they use dlopen() ? It has a man page that you can read up on if you're interested.

This is correct. The dlopen(<libname>) function opens a shared library at run-time, and then you use the dlsym() function to get pointers to named functions within that library. Then you just store a reference to the function pointer and call that whenever you need to do S3TC-related work. Check out <dlfcn.h> and the dlopen/dlsym/dlclose man pages.

Think of the S3TC library as a plugin which is loaded if it's present, but if the Mesa library doesn't find it, or can't load it, it's no big deal.

[curaga]

However, it was pointed out in the mailing list thread that you're going to have to compile mesa *anyway* to get the float support, so it doesn't really matter on top to have s3tc included.

Then the usual benefits, ie one place to go, no bitrot...

[darkbasic]

So what is correct Mr Smarty Pants?

Obviously the opposite, what else?
Also, don't feel offended if someone corrects you when you write yourself that you may be wrong...

[pvtcupcakes]

So what is correct Mr Smarty Pants?

The S3TC library doesn't have to be present at compile time. You can compile it after compiling Mesa, and Mesa dynamically loads it somehow. It's linked at runtime rather than compile time. I think they use dlopen() ? It has a man page that you can read up on if you're interested.

[?John?]

Software patents suck.

Damn right. That's why the US residents should finally wake up and do something about it, because "Yes, you can!" and you're most likely the only ones who can.
If you find anything in the current legislation outrageous, stupid or both, simply start urging your representative to change that and don't forget to be persistent, because they just can't ignore the flood of mail and phone calls forever. If only "bothering your congressman with something like this as many times a day as you can" was made into a competition. The only problem might be organizing something like that on a massive scale and that's when social networks come in. I wonder how much longer is it gonna take before sheeple realize the power of democracy, which they're so unwilling to use.
I'm quite sure that many Europeans would love to help, but there's probably not much we can do other than showing our support.

[FireBurn]

Wrong.


Wrong.


There isn't any out of sync problem, an external library for S3TC is a very good solution.

So what is correct Mr Smarty Pants?

[89c51]

Software patents suck.

the bigger problem is that an open specification decided to use patented stuff IMO

i don't know however if it could be done in another way