Lightspark May Work Towards A Gallium3D State Tracker

[SgtH3nry3]

Firefox doesn't support H.264 video. You'll still need flash for that.

No need for H.264.

With the next generation Android OS and devices the WebM format will not only work on desktop computers (Firefox 4.0, Opera 10.6, Chrome 6, Internet Explorer 9) but also on mobile devices and Google TV sets.

Anything GNU and or *nix or even browser capable will eventually support it. Dedicated decode/encode hardware is being developed as we speak.

So the Lightspark developers should abandond their project and go to work on OpenCL? Why would they do that?

Clean code. You don't want hundreds of state trackers.

Using an abstract, open, multiplatform umbrella API you don't have to complicate things by building your own API.
Even if it's more cumbersome to develop due to the lack of tools and documentation.

[BlackStar]

If everyone likes Gallium that much you could also expose it as a new api like OGL and let applications handle this like they want because it wouldn't be necessary to move every state tracker directly into mesa.

I don't know if that's feasible but that would be my Idea on this point without having too much knowledge on this.
To the experts, would it be Possible to do something like that?

I'm pretty sure you can build a new state tracker without modifying mesa.

[BlackStar]

Flash will begin to die as soon as Firefox 4 is released and HTML5 <video> tag support is out in the wild. Nobody will need Flash to play H.264 videos any longer, and lots of other services (e.g. browser games) implement effects on top of <canvas> and JavaScript. Even Internet Exlorer 9 is there.

Firefox doesn't support H.264 video. You'll still need flash for that.

If people want to work on Gallium state trackers, please focus on OpenCL. It is the correct and portable way to implement stuff like this.

So the Lightspark developers should abandond their project and go to work on OpenCL? Why would they do that?

Or do you mean they should try to use OpenCL to accelerate Lightspark? This would be completely unproductive:
- OpenCL requires binary drivers and a brand new GPU
- Getting good performance out of OpenCL is very very difficult
- You'd need separate codepaths for each GPU vendor (otherwise you can get lower performance than using just the CPU)
- OpenCL tools suck

A Gallium state tracker specifically for Lightspark will require multiple code paths to support other environments besides Linux. Gallium3D is no standard subsystem on the majority of operating systems.

So what? They can always ship Gallium softpipe for those operating systems. (Provided they actually give a damn in the first place.)

[Ragas]

If everyone likes Gallium that much you could also expose it as a new api like OGL and let applications handle this like they want because it wouldn't be necessary to move every state tracker directly into mesa.

I don't know if that's feasible but that would be my Idea on this point without having too much knowledge on this.
To the experts, would it be Possible to do something like that?

[BlackStar]

The fact that everyone seems to be considering the raw Gallium3d API for acceleration goes to show how much OpenGL sucks. Think about it for a moment.

[sturmflut]

Seriously, it's just flash, not rocket science.

Flash will begin to die as soon as Firefox 4 is released and HTML5 <video> tag support is out in the wild. Nobody will need Flash to play H.264 videos any longer, and lots of other services (e.g. browser games) implement effects on top of <canvas> and JavaScript. Even Internet Exlorer 9 is there.

If people want to work on Gallium state trackers, please focus on OpenCL. It is the correct and portable way to implement stuff like this. A Gallium state tracker specifically for Lightspark will require multiple code paths to support other environments besides Linux. Gallium3D is no standard subsystem on the majority of operating systems.

[fabiank22]

Yay, let's do state trackers for every program, so all of my desktop relies on the latest version of Mesa/Gallium, the Kernel and libdrm.

Seriously, it's just flash, not rocket science. Just simply use one of the existing backends for gpu-offloading, try to get the flash-API right and it'll work. I have nearly no CPU/GPU-workload while playing 1080p-Videos on Windows, just get to that state instead of trying insane perfomance enhancement schemes.

Also I bet having Mesa-invasive changes as a dependency will be hell to package, but seeing how Lightspark doesn't even have the goal of fully supporting the Flash-spec(that would be Gnash, which actually works okay, thank you very much fsf), but rather "modern features" of the language, aka whatever the devs feel like that won't matter that much. Gnash ftw.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Lightspark May Work Towards A Gallium3D State Tracker

With the Gallium3D driver architecture there's state trackers for Mesa, OpenVG, OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0, and even most recently one for exposing Direct3D 10.0/11.0 on Linux. These state trackers are then what can run on the Gallium3D hardware drivers or even on the CPU in the case of Softpipe and the much more interesting LLVMpipe. There's even now a new Gallium3D state tracker being contemplated by the Lightspark Flash Player project...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODY0Ng