Mesa 10.2 Improves Linux's Open-Source Graphics Drivers 58
An anonymous reader writes "Mesa 10.2 was introduced this week as the new shining example of what open source graphics (and open source projects in general) are capable of achieving. The latest release of this often underrepresented open source graphics driver project has many new OpenGL and driver features including a number of new OpenGL 4 extensions. The reverse-engineered Freedreno driver now poses serious competition to Qualcomm's Adreno driver, an OpenMAX implementation was added for Radeon video encoding support, Intel Broadwell support now works better, the software rasterizer supports OpenGL 3.3, and many other changes are present."
Still relevant nowadays? (Score:1, Flamebait)
While I'm pleased to see a longstanding opensource project is alive & well, I'm not sure if it's really relevant anymore.
Slashdotter, what say you?
Re: (Score:1, Redundant)
That should be Slashdotters, as in plural, sorry.
Re:Still relevant nowadays? (Score:5, Interesting)
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3 or 4 years ago, my eeePC netbook had an on-board Intel whose driver only supported OpenGL 1.x on Windows. (You had to use Mesa.)
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you're doing OpenGL in QtQuick2? Is that even, uhm, sane? :)
Any links to (open source) examples would be welcome, as I had a look recently, and simply got scared.
Disclaimer: I use QML et al to develop a Jolla app, and have another app in an early planning stage, where I still need to figure out how to make nice graphs.
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As for the graphs, there are some commercial graphs supplied by digia http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/... [digia.com] or KDAB http://www.kdab.com/kdab-produ... [kdab.com] or freely available QWT http://qwt.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] .
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Big thank you! /. still :)
I knew there was cause to stay with
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IDK if this is relevant to your particular work, but there are some very good Javascript libraries now - d3js.org comes to mind. IIRC Google has one or two as well.
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Thank you! /. still :)
I knew there was cause to stay with
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winforms or wpf is simpler...
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Ive been working on a platform that is Linux running on a 1 GHz, 32 bit ARM, where we want to run an already existing Qt Quick 2 application. We have run mockup applications with X using the virtual framebuffer and the mesa software renderer, and found performance to be really bad. On the order of 1 FPS or so. Any suggestions on ways to make the software renderer more usable? My understanding is that LLVM would help here, but only works on x86 and x64.
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opensource (...) relevant
I would say that you are clueless idiot who likes the smell of his own verbal excrement on the internet.
*** Relevance fight! ***
Rosin yer bows fiddlers, hike yer skirts ladies and sweep out the pit, smoke dem crawdads while you got 'em... we're gonna have open source pit 'relevance wraslin' tonite!
Over in the corner Papa Snuff Daddy is totin' his signed binary drivers, he's a real tootin' feller. He installs clean and you can see he's runnin' but yo better watch out for his kernel panic hold, it'll get ya good. And when he gets ya, whatch gonna do, patch him? He's been patched so many times but the scars d
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Mod parent "+1 Wait, what?"
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Never heard of 'In Watermelon Sugar' before. It was weirdly beautiful.
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See below for the comment you likely intended to make before you had a Tourette's spasm
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
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I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that "Tough Love" left precisely the intended comment.
On the other hand, I'm gonna say that they have also been trolled
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Trolled by whom exactly??
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You mean you ended a serious comment with "Slashdotter, what say you?"
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Yes, I did.
What's wrong with asking for the opinion of others who may have more insight?
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err.. Mesa has formed the basis of opengl support in linux since the 90s.. It's still used today.
Relevent unless you are using binary drivers (Score:5, Informative)
Unless your graphics driver provides a full 3D stack (userspace GL libraries down to kernel drivers) you will be using Mesa on Linux. You are probably thinking of Mesa as purely a software renderer whereas it is also used as a frontend to open source 3D drivers and uses DRI to provide access to the hardware's acceleration.
I've yet to see binary any drivers use Mesa.
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Hmmm. Interesting. Maybe they finally realized that they could re-use existing code instead of shipping their broken drivers year after year. Good for AMD!
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While I'm pleased to see a longstanding opensource project is alive & well, I'm not sure if it's really relevant anymore.
Slashdotter, what say you?
The main OpenGL stack of Linux is not relevant? Interesting.
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My impression is that basically all Linux distributions install the open source drivers by default. And in my experience, installing the proprietary drivers is messy.
And most distributions uses 3D in the window manager by default.
So I imagine that many more Linux users use the open source drivers (which in turn use Mesa) than uses the proprietary drivers.
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Yes. There are free software projects making a driver for each of those, build upon Mesa. Both AMD (a lot) and NVIDIA (in small measure) has actually contributed to those projects, in addition to their closed source drivers.
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Just because a libre driver exists doesn't mean that people are going to want to use it. Those of us interested in performance are far more likely to immediately dump those libre drivers for something that actually works well.
Free Software zealotry in this area really only makes sense if you are actively avoiding all of the software that would need a good OpenGL implementation. Most of that stuff is not Free Software either.
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For dual screen setups, using the proprietary drivers is an absolute mess, while the open source drivers work perfectly. And the free drivers are perfectly adequate for non-high-end-gaming. I can play Minecraft at 1920x1600 with the open source Radeon driver at acceptable framerates.
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Both ATI and NVidia cards have quite decent functionality on Linux without those vendors' drivers.
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No, in fact, that's one thing I definitely will NOT be using.
"that's probably the majority of users."
Gnu/linux has indeed gotten 'easy' enough to attract some clueless noobs, but I really doubt they are the majority.
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Plus, binary blobs in a GPL kernel?
There's a lot of people that uses Linux that does not care about that, most of them using Android.
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Absolutely.
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One day we'll be able to alt-tab in and out of over ten-year-old games!
Re: capable of achieving (Score:5, Insightful)
That's fine, they don't really sell new games anymore. They sell subscriptions to services that resemble games.
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Oh man. That's so damn true if I had mod points I'd have to +1 ya even if you are anon.
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The price paid for going FOSS is more obvious on the desktop, at least if you need more punch than Intel is going to provide, since Nvidia and AMD both offer something resembling real support to proprietary customers; but once you go mobile, the state of binary drivers goes downhill fast. X drivers are more the exception than the rule, and Android drivers might go from being frozen in t
Re: capable of achieving (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been following Mesa's development for some time while working on some cross-platform 3D graphics stuff.
Right now Mesa's OpenGL implementation for Intel HD Graphics 4000+ is probably more complete than the Windows driver's. This isn't exactly a trivial accomplishment. A working OpenGL 3.3 implementation is more than what Apple offered for a long time.
Some GL features are obviously not as well optimized in Mesa, but many of them are so bad they're at least "considered harmful" anyway. And with 10.2 we got gems like ARB_buffer_storage, which basically removes the API overhead from accessing the GPU's memory. No more unpredictable stalls while writing data!
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But MESA isn't OpenGL 4.0 compliant yet and that "ARB_buffer_storage" extension is from OpenGL 4.4.. How is it likely that somehow will write an hybrid application that supports OpenGL 3.3 (or 3.1) plus that one mismatched extension?
Then, maybe Ivy Bridge and some cards are supported under OpenGL 3.3 but you need to upgrade to a very recent linux distro (unless you like manual installations or unoffical sources) and then crucially, Sandy Bridge only supports OpenGL 3.1. So your application or game will targ
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But MESA isn't OpenGL 4.0 compliant yet and that "ARB_buffer_storage" extension is from OpenGL 4.4.. How is it likely that somehow will write an hybrid application that supports OpenGL 3.3 (or 3.1) plus that one mismatched extension?
Quite likely, because that's the way the extension system works.
Re:When you go from shit to crap (Score:4, Insightful)
Then why post on slashdot? Perhaps neowin is better for you?