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

Mon Dec 5 07:09:46 CET 2011

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
+