NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau

Posted Sep 24, 2013 20:21 UTC (Tue) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]

No.

What a well thought out and comprehensive reply. Galium3d is:

Gallium3D is a framework intended to ease the programming of device drivers for 3D graphics chipsets by splitting the graphics device driver into three parts. This is accomplished by the introduction of two interfaces: Gallium3D State Tracker Interface and the Gallium3D WinSys Interface. The three components are called

Gallium3D State Tracker – each graphical API by which a device driver is being addressed has its own State Tracker, e.g. there is a Gallium3D State Tracker for OpenGL and a different ones for Direct3D or GLX. Each State Tracker contains an implementation of the Gallium3D State Tracker Interface, and is unique, this means is shared by all existent Gallium3D device drivers.

Gallium3D hardware device driver – this is the actual code, that is specific to the underlying 3D graphic accelerator chip, but only as far as the Gallium3D WinSys Interface allows. There is a unique Gallium3D hardware device driver for each available graphics chip and each implements the Gallium3D State Tracker Interface as well as the Gallium3D WinSys Interface.

Gallium3D WinSys – is specific to the underlying kernel of the operating system and each one implements the Gallium3D WinSys Interface to interface with all available Gallium3D hardware device drivers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium3D

Whether or not AMD is assisting in the development of the hardware device driver for AMD hardware of Galium3D has little bearing on the entirety of Galium3D. This hardware driver has almost no code reuse with other hardware. This is because the device driver portion is a relatively small part of the entirety of Galium3D though it is a very important part. As I said, the last I saw the bulk of the Galium3D development is being funded by VmWare (I believe to advance their goal of desktop virtualization, though I could never find official company statements acknowledging it). Though hardware vendors have provided some assistance to development of the small graphics driver portion there is far more to G3D than just the hardware driver.

The whole point of the G3D setup is to abstract the hardware. This is where the bulk of the work in G3D is. Yes you still need hardware drivers that talk the hardware's language but the abstraction allows you to build the pipeline and interface with hardware independence. It is my understanding that the state tracker and winsys portion of the driver compose the vast majority of G3D with the hardware driver composing essentially just shim between the hardware and G3D. Last I saw none of the graphics OEMs except for intel had paid for development time on the state tracker or winsys. I haven't looked for a year so maybe that's changed (and google wasn't helpful, probably because my google-fu is week) but I would be surprised if much has changed on the G3D development front.