"Mega Drivers" Still Being Targeted For Mesa

[phoronix]

Phoronix: "Mega Drivers" Still Being Targeted For Mesa

Eric Anholt at Intel's Open-Source Technology Center is still working on moving Mesa towards a "mega drivers" concept to further reduce disk space and to optimistically increase performance...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTQ2OTc

[Veerappan]

No video link or embedded video?

[xeekei]

If this is true, why were they seperated in the first place?

[oibaf]

What about memory usage? This will save disk space but all drivers will be loaded and will use system memory.

[Ericg]

What about memory usage? This will save disk space but all drivers will be loaded and will use system memory.

His one note says that they dont garbage collect public symbols anyway, so just having the drivers loaded is a memory leak (i would think). Another slide says that there wont BE any public symbols after this so that fixes memory usage right there.

Smaller drivers (in size) + proper optimizations + fixed memory leak... To me it seems like it probably wouldnt be that much of a jump to just load them all together once everythings done

[alanc]

No video link or embedded video?

Videos from the third day are not posted to youtube yet (people are now traveling home from XDC, so it may take a couple days), but are available as raw mp4 files linked off each talk in the XDC2013 Program page.

[Drago]

What about memory usage? This will save disk space but all drivers will be loaded and will use system memory.

Portions of the mesa that are not used (the other drivers) will be swapped out, so they will not consume real memory.

[Lynxeye]

What about memory usage? This will save disk space but all drivers will be loaded and will use system memory.

You know we have this "damand paging" feature in Linux since, hm let me think, always? This means even a fat driver library will only consume virtual address space, as long as nothing is using most of it. Only when someone really calls some function the page containing this func is faulted into physical memory.

[rudregues]

If this is true, why were they seperated in the first place?

Good Question... So from now on there will be Mesa, Mega and Gallium3D as separated projects or the three will be merged? It seems like an isolated initiative that can turn a big one (like Wayland was thanks to Kristian Hoegsberg).

[Daktyl198]

Good Question... So from now on there will be Mesa, Mega and Gallium3D as separated projects or the three will be merged? It seems like an isolated initiative that can turn a big one (like Wayland was thanks to Kristian Hoegsberg).

"Mega drivers" isn't really a driver interface like Gallium3D, it's just a name for a new concept on how to build Mesa and Gallium3D drivers. I'm really looking forward to it being implemented.