3D overlord
Posted Dec 1, 2009 17:11 UTC (Tue) by
drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to:
3D overlord by eru
Parent article:
Between Fedora 12 and 13
Well don't worry to much about the concentration on '3D'. The GPU is really
just a bunch of tiny processor cores, really. We (in Linux) can't use them
for anything to substantial in distros because the proprietary software,
well, is proprietary, and
the open source stuff is not up to snuff yet. Think about it like a math
co-processor in a 286 machine.
The 'fixed function' "OpenGL Accelerator" or "DirectX Accelerator" style
graphics card which was designed to specifically acceleration one or two
APIs started dying off with the introduction of things like 'Geforce 256'.
Every since then they are growing more and more general purpose. The DDX
and Mesa DRI drivers were designed specifically for that sort of 'fixed
function' were you hand off certain OpenGL functions to hardware. This is
one of the reasons that hardware support is so slow coming and it's so
difficult to make them stable and useful.
The Geforce 256 was the first major step away from that sort of concept and
it was introduced around mid-1999, which goes to show you how far behind
Linux really is.
Nowadays they can be used for just about anything. Accelerating media
decoding/encoding, (certain types of) super-fast floating point
calculations for scientific calculations and stuff like that. Hell I expect
that they could possibly be used for some sort of crypto or random number
generation. The push for the '3D' desktop is partially just a vehicle for
change. To get users to actually start caring and heavily use 3D stuff;
especially open source drivers. The unified memory management and related
items (KMS/DRI2/etc) are a basic dependency for Linux to take advantage of
the power the GPU can unlock.
Besides all that, of course, it will help with security since we can
separate graphical users from root in a much more substantial way and it
will help making the desktop more attractive due to the increase in
performance, stability, and that sort of thing.
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