[Mesa3d-dev] Re: [Dri-devel] Re: [forum] Notes from a teleconference held 2003-3-27

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

On Fri, Apr 04, 2003 at 10:09:00PM +0100, Keith Whitwell wrote:
> Philip Brown wrote:
> > Are you perhaps envisioning pushing Mesa to evolve into something
> > like the nvidia  UDA  API? Where there is suddenly a single, unified
> > cross-hardware/OS platform for all 3d-accel hardware access to program to?
> > 
> > 
> > I think that could potentially be a very interesting idea. But it would
> > probably double the Mesa codebase size, most likely, and so should be
> > managed VEEEEERY carefully. Certainly doable, but it should be
> > Done Right(tm).
> 
> That's not a stated plan, afaik, but nobody would want to rule out such an idea.
> 
> And, actually it wouldn't increase the code size of Mesa at all, as Mesa 
> already runs on many different platforms & is basically os-neutral.  The 
> os-dependant parts tend to be the window system bindings and of course the 
> kernel components of the actual drivers.

That last bit is sort of what I'm referring to.
Mesa currently supports only a subset of video cards currently suported by
DRI.  DRI only works in conjunction with an X server, as far
as I know, because it is dependant on the GLX api, and cant function
through OpenGL alone.

So to truely create something akin to nvidia's UDA libs/interface, would
involve porting support for 3d hardware currently handled by DRI, over to
Mesa, and making mesa capable of using it directly, without X.

Then the dri source tree would become considerably emptier :->