The X.Org Plans In Ubuntu 11.04, Again

[bridgman]

For what it's worth, we are planning to only implement acceleration support for Northern Islands and future GPU cores in the r600g code base. This is obviously only a minor point since the community could backport support to the classic driver, but I believe the development community is strongly committed to the r600g code base.

[HokTar]

The question is, why not to stick?

Seriously, even if the r600g driver had achieved total feature and speed parity with the r600c, it would still lack an important advantage: Wider testing for a longer period of time.

Why throw away this advantage, if the gallium version doesn't offer anything significant over the classic version at the moment? Just to be cool and have the latest? This is the mark of the stupid, or the mazochist(<troll>in case of Fedora users</troll>).

I believe Ubuntu 11.10 will and Mesa of that time frame will use r600g by default, by that time it will be much more tested and feature complete, and it might provide advantages over the classic driver. Until then, sticking with the classic is sane.

This is a valid point.
However, I never preferred r600g just because it's newer. My post was maybe a bit inadequately worded in the sense that r600g is only about 3 months old but it is basically already on feature parity with classic, does not crash often (haven't in the last week or so) for me(tm).
So assuming that the speed of development won't slow down significantly it very well might bring obvious advantages (speed/opengl, etc) by next April.
Plus some guys are working on a video decoding state tracker for gallium/r600g.

Point is, that I thought they completely ruled out the possibility to default to r600g. However, as bridgman pointed out this is not the case, so *I take my word back*.

[TemplarGR]

Why do they stick so eagerly to r600c?

The question is, why not to stick?

Seriously, even if the r600g driver had achieved total feature and speed parity with the r600c, it would still lack an important advantage: Wider testing for a longer period of time.

Why throw away this advantage, if the gallium version doesn't offer anything significant over the classic version at the moment? Just to be cool and have the latest? This is the mark of the stupid, or the mazochist(<troll>in case of Fedora users</troll>).

I believe Ubuntu 11.10 will and Mesa of that time frame will use r600g by default, by that time it will be much more tested and feature complete, and it might provide advantages over the classic driver. Until then, sticking with the classic is sane.

[bridgman]

Sure, but I would be at LPC and blissfully unaware of your suffering

[HokTar]

But in that ideal world I would sit here without a clue, frustrated, depressed, since I have no idea what's wrong. It doesn't sound such an ideal world anymore...

:P

[bridgman]

I guess I should mention that agd5f is at LPC too. In a perfect world I would be there too, and you wouldn't be hearing from me either

[HokTar]

The mailing list message (follow link in the article) actually said that they will go with 600c or 600g depending on what the upstream chooses (presumably for 7.10) :

"Gallium: Will switch to r300g by default; distro-patch in xorg.conf option to switch back to classic. Load classic when KMS is not available. Will go with upstream default for r600g/r600c; this is currently r600c. Will add xorg.conf option to switch."

I have to admit that I got careless here. Michael usually mentions such details so I ended up being lazy and did not read the original message. Apologies.

Kernel Summit followed by LPC, I suspect.

Valid point, I didn't know they were attending.

Thanks for your time!

[bridgman]

Why do they stick so eagerly to r600c?

The mailing list message (follow link in the article) actually said that they will go with 600c or 600g depending on what the upstream chooses (presumably for 7.10) :

"Gallium: Will switch to r300g by default; distro-patch in xorg.conf option to switch back to classic. Load classic when KMS is not available. Will go with upstream default for r600g/r600c; this is currently r600c. Will add xorg.conf option to switch."

However, Dave and Jerome disappeared in the last few weeks (no commits for the last 11 and 30 days).

Kernel Summit followed by LPC, I suspect.

[RealNC]

Why do they stick so eagerly to r600c?

Because Ubuntu is not Fedora? (Meaning it's not an experimental, latest pre-beta bleeding edge distro, but rather intended to be solid and stable.) r600g is not considered ready. It's not even beta yet.

[DanL]

Considering Ubuntu's target user base, the plans to adopt gallium3d are already pretty aggressive. Canonical might be even more eager for gallium3d if intel was, but intel needs a change in perspective for that to happen.