Where Things Fall Short: Eight Shortcomings Of Mesa 8.0

[elanthis]

Is possible known how much patent issue on some functionalities present on the OpenGL standard could affect 3d applications as for example blender?*

Check which OpenGL features/extensions they use and then check the ARB extension registry to see if those extensions have patents on them? Or, alternatively, just run those apps on stock Mesa drivers and see if they work?

Also is possible known if at least intel have made some workaround about similar problem on their drive? For their Cpu?

Unfortunately, the hardware aspects aren't the problem. The ATI/NVIDIA hardware already implements these patented features. The problem is that the software drivers have to implement parts of them to support various corner cases. It might in theory be possible for the drivers to just be thin wrappers around hardware which implements all these features, but that would make the cost of the hardware skyrocket.

[elanthis]

I wonder when we'll see the "Eight Shortcomings of PTS" article. It's so easy to pick a random missing feature and complain about it. Here, let me give you five to get you started:

You might have just won at Phoronix.

[alelinuxbsd]

Is possible known how much patent issue on some functionalities present on the OpenGL standard could affect 3d applications as for example blender?*

Also is possible known if at least intel have made some workaround about similar problem on their drive? For their Cpu?

Note:
On the article the main topic is the game aspect while i'm more interest on other type of applications.

[soupbowl]

Man, you were really hard pressed to find 8 points to complain about, weren't you? Might as well add "doesn't make me a sandwich" while you're at it.

I wonder when we'll see the "Eight Shortcomings of PTS" article. It's so easy to pick a random missing feature and complain about it. Here, let me give you five to get you started:

1. Other operating systems (Windows, ReactOS, AROS, Haiku, Android, Tizen, ...) still not fully supported since some or all benchmark profiles don't work.
2. SVG still not fully supported. That's 11 years late.
3. Missing networking Benchmarks.
4. It's still not reporting a 3DMark score due to legal/copyright issues. Honestly, that's inexcusable, and I won't accept workarounds.
5. Missing Hardware support. Still can't benchmark smartphones or game consoles.

Well, on a more positive note, if the complaints boil down to "still not quite the proprietary drivers", then I guess it's all good.

lol great post, exactly what I thought.

[krazy]

Officially UVD is still off the table, but I also said that we would see if we could find ways to provide some level of support. We started working seriously on that in mid-2011. I don't know at this point if we will be able to release anything, however. We left this effort until later in the program because it's a lot of work with no guarantee of success, ie we may spend a lot of time on it and in the end not be able to release anything.

That's very interesting. Thanks for the update, and good luck fighting the lawyers!

[Wilfred]

HDMI audio is implemented (Alex finished a first pass last year), we're just having a heck of a time figuring out if we can release it.

Right now the priorities are SI support, OpenCL and figuring out if we can release some kind of UVD support.

Thanks for this information. And your comments and efforts in general.

[oibaf]

Arch Linux does enable the floating-point support as part of its configuration, but aside from this rolling-release distribution there aren't any other major vendors daring to enable the code.

Aye you sure? It's a quite old news, actually...

[bridgman]

Officially UVD is still off the table, but I also said that we would see if we could find ways to provide some level of support. We started working seriously on that in mid-2011. I don't know at this point if we will be able to release anything, however. We left this effort until later in the program because it's a lot of work with no guarantee of success, ie we may spend a lot of time on it and in the end not be able to release anything.

Southern Islands, I think.

Right. The SI support we are working on refers to Southern Islands. Before we launched the HD 7970 I was referring to it as GCN since that was the only name we had made public. First priority was getting the foundation changes working and released (multiple ring support, GPU VM, LLVM back end), now the focus is shifting more towards SI-specific bits.

Wasn't HDMI audio reverse engineered and accepted into the kernel already?

Yes, just recently. The work Alex did was more comprehensive but also more challenging to release.

I wish better power management was somewhere in that list, but I suppose it's not much more important than those items either.

It is somewhere on the list but in general we are trying to focus our devs on things the community would have a tough time doing without us either writing documentation or providing an initial implementation.

Power management is a bit unusual in the sense that the current implementation could be improved significantly with the information that is already available (improving the interpretation of specific BIOS images, fixing up dynpm to work in more cases) *and* we are trying to release other hardware bits as time permits.

[krazy]

Right now the priorities are ... figuring out if we can release some kind of UVD support.

It is very good to hear that there is movement on this. I thought that releasing any kind of UVD support was totally off the table due to DRM.

Can you provide any more details of what you are trying to release? Would it be limited or full UVD support?

[siride]

+1 for this

But I'd like to point out it's

sudo make me a sandwich

Still not funny.