OpenCL Support Atop Gallium3D Is Here, Sort Of

[blindfrog]

Hopefully basic 3d accel and KMS for r600+ will make it to Fedora 12

[bridgman]

Depends what you mean by "core work". I agree that our time is generally best spent adding support for new GPUs, since that is the one area where access to inside information can speed up understanding and troubleshooting even if the inside information can't be released.

That said, there are also a few places where pitching in a bit of effort might be able to "push something over the hump" and make it possible for community developers to make progress on other parts of the stack. That's how I see the 3xx-5xx Gallium3D driver, and why I think it's worthy of some time.

[Xavier]

I reallistically can't see outside devs bringing a full-featured driver for a just-released hardware. And I can't see AMD releasing specs way before the hardware is selling.
So community work will always be good for infrastructure, porting and debugging, but the core work has to be done by insiders if it's meant to be on time (not years after the hardware is on the shelves).

[bridgman]

Remember that it's not just us doing the work. Our developers are supposed to be "a small part of a much larger community".

[Xavier]

We'll have a better idea once the 3xx-5xx Gallium3D driver is further along.

Cooper is starting to come up to speed on the r300g driver and will help there; the "plan" is still that 6xx/7xx classic mesa, 3xx-5xx Gallium3D and 6xx/7xx KMS/GEM/TTM/DRI2 will all finish off at roughly the same time. All of them seem to be pretty close now; between MostAwesomeDude's work and nha porting the shader compiler across I have to think that most of the heavy lifting for the 3xx-5xx Gallium3D driver has been done.

Once those three are all working, we can tell you roughly how long it will take for the 6xx/7xx Gallium3D driver

Here's hoping the 8xx driver won't lag too much.
You seem to have so much work on your plate

[Pfanne]

good to know.
thanks

[bridgman]

We'll have a better idea once the 3xx-5xx Gallium3D driver is further along.

Cooper is starting to come up to speed on the r300g driver and will help there; the "plan" is still that 6xx/7xx classic mesa, 3xx-5xx Gallium3D and 6xx/7xx KMS/GEM/TTM/DRI2 will all finish off at roughly the same time. All of them seem to be pretty close now; between MostAwesomeDude's work and nha porting the shader compiler across I have to think that most of the heavy lifting for the 3xx-5xx Gallium3D driver has been done.

Once those three are all working, we can tell you roughly how long it will take for the 6xx/7xx Gallium3D driver

[Pfanne]

every time i hear this i get excited and cant wait xD
i know i sound impatient, but how long will a basic gallium port take. (i feel like im asking you this question every time you answer one of mine ^^), since mostawesomedude has been working on the r300-500 code for ages. ( i know he is not a fulltime developer and you have more manpower )

[bridgman]

when is classic mesa finished?
i mean feature wise...
is there a concrete list of features they want to implement, then call it a day and start working on gallium?

Most of the features were finished in April, and any missing bits were added along the way while porting across to the radeon-rewrite code base. All we're doing now is fixing bugs. We may run across other missing bits along the way but feature-wise the code has been finished for a while.

Work will continue on the classic Mesa implementation even after the initial bug-fixing is done, including getting it running over KMS/GEM/TTM, and we will probably use the classic mesa implementation as a base for extending the shader compiler, but the bug fixing is the only reason for not starting Gallium3D 6xx/7xx work now.

I just hate porting code to a new platform unless it works properly on the current platform. We didn't really have a choice in the case of radeon-rewrite, but porting is *much* easier if you start with something that's already working the way you want

[whizse]

It would really be bad if Intel didn't at least have long term plans for Gallium use, considering there's already basic drivers available.

Oh well, time will tell...