Getting to a GL based X server

Dave Airlie airlied at gmail.com
Thu May 26 15:44:26 PDT 2005


> Which, last I checked, corresponded roughly to: KAA, fixed function 3D engine,
> 3D with shader hotness.
> 
> Remind me why on earth I would want to use fb to do core X and Render to a
> texture, then use a software GL engine to interpolate that across the screen.

You're a masochist maybe? I'll state here ane now that accelerating
Mesa to do what we want will never get us anything close to the KAA
stuff (even KAA with little or none hardware acceleration..), there
are too many layers of indirection between the top of the OpenGL stack
and the framebuffer, it works fine with hardware, software rendering
is sucky.... XAA is better than this....

My main worry with KAA is that it only work on radeon, which Xgl will
work just as well on if not better on, I want to see the KAA
developers and devotees put some effort into bringing up KAA on some
crappy piece of shit like an SiS6326 or i810 (there is a start of a
driver but nothing doing the whole lot...), I like the idea of KAA
being able to help out the older cards and 2D only things, but so far
I've only seen it work on a card that already has the best opensource
3D support so it doesn't help much...

I've also seen 0 docs on the KAA interfaces, how to start writing
drivers, plans to bring it into the Xorg server, etc... at least Jon
is trying to draft a future for Xegl and what we need for it, KAA
needs someone pushing it or we'll just end up with a radeon driver and
a lot of effort for nothing...

Dave.
> 
> > Xgl may consequential have big impacts on Gnome and KDE.  Even though
> > everything is GL based, software GL performs very differently than a
> > Radeon X800. Gnome and KDE can't even begin to work on this problem
> > until the server is beta.
> 
> Or, those people could just use a sane 2D acceleration architecture.
> 
> Which XAA is not.
> 
> If you're really arguing that every server, even those running on chips where
> we have no hardware 3D support, should be running on a GL engine, then I'll
> just stop listening now, because you're delusional.
> 
> - ajax
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> xorg mailing list
> xorg at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
> 
> 
> 
>



More information about the xorg mailing list