[Mageia-dev] [RFC] nouveau, swrastg, libdri-drivers-experimental

[Anssi Hannula]

Hi!

1. nouveau

I propose to move nouveau DRI drivers from libdri-drivers-experimental
to libdri-drivers.

Fedora moved them out of -experimental in last January, Ubuntu in last
June, OpenSUSE in July (though OpenSUSE doesn't have the legacy
nouveau_vieux DRI driver at all), and Debian a week ago.

I've been running with it for the last week or so with no problems on my
card.

WDYT?


2. swrastg

It seems we have both swrast_dri.so and swrastg_dri.so in libdri-drivers
package.

swrast_dri.so is the traditional SW rasterizer used when there is no HW
support.

swrastg_dri.so is the Gallium3d-based rasterizer which is considerably
faster.

However, actually only swrast_dri.so is used, so should we:
1) switch to swrastg, drop swrast (Fedora in Nov 2010)
2) keep it as is, unused (~4 MB)
3) move swrastg to libdri-drivers-experimental (Ubuntu in Jun 2010,
   Debian a week ago) which nouveau is probably moving out of
4) drop swrastg completely for now (seemingly OpenSUSE)

Unfortunately I have no idea on the status of swrastg beyond the above
distro information, and the fact that it does indeed work as tested
while writing this, and XBMC runs smoother with it than with swrast.

I'd be somewhat inclined to follow Fedora here, but I'm not at all sure.

WDYT (see also below)?


Implementation note: With a quick look I didn't find any easy way to
switch a system to use swrastg_dri.so when both are installed; if we
want to provide switching between them, we need to either
a) use alternatives for swrast_dri.so, or
b) have swrastg_dri.so in a different dir and have that path first in
   the dri search path so that when -experimental is installed, it
   will get preferred (while mesa has the needed code already, xserver
   would need a trivial patch as it currently has a single search path)

WDYT?

-- 
Anssi Hannula