Blumenkrantz Picks His Next Battle: Mesa's DRI Interfaces

Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz has been known for many great Mesa improvements the past several years, especially around Zink for the OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation within Mesa. Over the past four years he has taken on many great performance optimizations and other significant code undertakings to improve Mesa. Blumenkrantz has picked his latest battle and appears to be around Mesa's Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) interfaces.

The Direct Rendering Infrastructure has been around since the late 90's for accessing the GPUs under the X.Org Server. The DRI was important in the early days for OpenGL with hardware acceleration. But today the landscape is very different, we're moving past an X11 world, and the DRI interfaces have become a nuisance.

Blumenkrantz wrote a new blog post taking aim at DRI and his challenge to take them on. He's started off with this pull request that would move the DRI interface headers within a Gallium3D sub-directory and with an end goal of removing them entirely:

"as @ajax put it, the year is 2024 and we no longer have to hurt ourselves by distributing (or versioning) these headers/interfaces. they can just be private.

which, of course, is the first step to deleting them entirely"

It's been raised though that ChromeOS is still using the DRI interfaces internally right now on AMD hardware. But Google engineers are working to move away from this and if this interface change is held off until Mesa 24.2 it should give them time to address it. We'll see how this latest programming adventure by Blumenkrantz goes.