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Xorg's X Window innovation - it's not ALL about the graphics (FSM)

[Posted June 2, 2009 by corbet]

Free Software Magazine has a wide-ranging look at what's going on around graphics programming. "Right now, LLVM is being developed, and a front-end made, to become a hardware-agnostic shaders compiler that will be part of Gallium. Currently, it works as an advanced prototype, and experiments are being made to support fully programmable shaders on cards that only support fixed function shaders without resorting to pure software emulation: LLVM compiles shader fragments down to instructions that fixed function cards can render in an accelerated manner (its VERY experimental for now: it may be a dead end, so dont bet on your Geforce3 card rendering current games in any usable way tomorrow!)."

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Posted Jun 3, 2009 14:52 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

The article seems a little confused about indirect vs. direct rendering, making it sound like it is a 2D vs. 3D thing.

While it might have been true in the past that 2D rendering was generally done indirect (client passes commands to the server which talks to the hardware) and 3D rendering done direct (client talks direct to hardware), that isn't the case now.

You can do indirect 3D rendering through AIGLX (client talks GLX to the server which talks to the hardware), and developers are working on using DRI/DRM to accelerate 2D rendering with Cairo. So the concepts are pretty orthogonal.

Xorg's X Window innovation - it's not ALL about the graphics (FSM)

Posted Jun 3, 2009 15:20 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I note that the article suddenly started talking about things being 'part
of Gallium' without ever saying what Gallium *was* (or where to find it).

Currently my impression of X is a ferment of fragmented activity. I hear
kernel modesetting is available for ATI cards, for instance, but where?
airlied's private git tree, documented only in a post to his blog. Now
maybe this is reasonable for testing, but it takes some time to figure out
even that there *is* a tree out there, let alone where it is: search
engines are all very good but you have to know what to search for. And
it's like that all over the shop. It starts to feel like you have to
become a stalker of the X devs to know what's going on :) and while this
was always true in free software to a degree, at least in the old days you
could hang out on a few dev lists and get most of the picture. This
doesn't seem to be so true anymore :(

Xorg's X Window innovation - it's not ALL about the graphics (FSM)

Posted Jun 3, 2009 19:47 UTC (Wed) by bridgman (guest, #50408) [Link]

The most common "escape route" for kernel modesetting code on ATI chips right now is probably Fedora releases; F10 had display and 2D accel for 5xx and below, F11 adds 3D accel for 5xx and below via the radeon-rewrite branch of mesa, and F12 will hopefully pick up the new TTM code and more support for 6xx and higher.

Jerome's blog (http://jglisse.livejournal.com) has the lastest repository links and status AFAIK.