[Mesa3d-dev] Call for more general hardware API

[<ph...@bo...>]

Howdy folks,

Probably noone except Brian here even vaguely knows my name. :-)
But I'm the guy who originally gave the GLX hack code to Brian, because
I thought it would be a really cool thing if Mesa broadened its horizons.

I'd like to do the same thing again. But this time, for hardware support.

I see a whole bunch of hardware acceleration support in Mesa right now...
And 99% of it is only for Linux.

I think that's pretty far from the original goals of Mesa, which was to be
a more crossplatform project.

I haven't dug deep down into the code. So I dont know the grungy details
on the "Glide" stuff, and the Xfree86 "DRI" stuff. But I know its pretty
much all linux-only

I DO know that when you get down to the very basic level of things,
there are only a few basic operations you can do with a piece of hardware.
Read/Write registers. Map memory.

So it boggles my mind to see all this Linux-only stuff.
It would seem to me that there isn't a basic API that encapsulates that
level. Something that just sticks to the core hardware neccessities, to
keep porting easy.
Because if there were, it would be almost trivial to port Mesa hardware
acceleration across platforms, and it would have been used already.

If there is one, and I missed it, please point me in the right direction.

If there isn't one: let's make one!

And then I'll write a solaris driver or two to match it.