Slashdot Mirror
Mesa 9.0 Released With Open Source OpenGL 3.1 Drivers
An anonymous reader writes "The Mesa developers released Mesa 9.0 with open-source OpenGL 3.1 driver support. This de facto OpenGL Linux implementation now supports the several year old OpenGL 3.1 specification for Intel hardware while the other drivers are still at OpenGL 3.0 or worse. Other features to Mesa 9.0 include completing MPEG1/MPEG2 video acceleration, early OpenCL support, bug-fixes, and new hardware support."
OpenGL 3.1 support is limited to Intel hardware, but at least ATI/AMD hardware supports some of OpenGL 3.1. A few features from OpenGL 4 were also added.
Mesa same as me,
Slashdotty as I can be,
Loving software free,
Cleanshaven, save goatee.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I would like to switch away from the Windows (I already am not touching Macs unless forced to), and this nice improvement in graphical performance might just be a step in the right direction for me to do the full switch at some point. Unfortunately I still am pretty dependent on the Adobe package for graphic tools in my line of work, but I hope to see the alternatives get there fast now that Adobe has consistently been pissing on its own leg for a longer period of time. And then there are the games. Pray tell this situation will improve.
More and more as home computing becomes about appliances instead of about general purpose PCs and more and more, different detail markets are looking to Linux to make these things happen, video chip makers who have bet most of their business on Microsoft-only support will soon need to rethink that notion.
Long ago, no one thought IBM could be humbled. No one could have imagined Novell becoming a novelty. And no one in Windows-centric IT shops want to admit that the vast majority of internet and databases out there are running on Linux servers and services.
Things are shifting but some people aren't noticing or believing.
F* You NVidia... F* You.
Once upon a time, Mesa was the magic that let me run quake 2 on a pc voodoo 2 graphics card on a mac by translating OpenGL to the glide library. It has come a long way.
You mean using the proprietary firmware?
(captcha: depress)
what the fuck is mesa?
why do i care?
why does this matter?
oh right, this is slashdot.
apple rules!
microsoft drools!
samsung is evil!
foxconn!
obama!
timothy!
I get the impression(whether this is better or worse is another question) that makers of video chipsets understand that Linux support is necessary to win certain markets(embedded Android stuff, *nix graphic workstations, compute clusters, etc.); but that "support" does not need to mean anything other than 'set of binary blobs that work with the one blessed kernel version and system configuration. If you are the purchaser of a consumer product, suck it up. If you have a suitably large enterprise support account, please contact our engineering/integration team.'
In the 'appliance' market, you aren't even supposed to touch the software, just twiddle the 'apps' on top of it, and much of the hardware(even when the components are well understood and fairly standard) is overtly hostile to tinkering. Yes, the chipset vendor had better have a Linux BSP if they want to make a sale; but(based on the state of 3rd-party Android ROMs), they definitely don't have to do it in a way that is overly helpful to 3rd parties.
In the expensive Workstation and Compute Stuff market, you have customers who will pay good money, sometimes excellent money, to Make It Work; but you also have customers used to the fact that 'Product X is only supported on RHEL Antiquated Edition with Nvidia Drivers v.Y'.
I hope that it doesn't stop at just Linux support. I'm actually OK with there being proprietary drivers as long as documentation is available so that we can build open drivers as well. In an ideal world all drivers are open.
Except Android is not Linux.
Exactly. What good is a binary blob for a specific version of the Linux kernel, when you need to run this piece of hardware on another incompatible version, on another architecture, or, say, on another open sourced OS like, say, FreeBSD? We don't need vendor lock-in through binary blobs; Open Specs is what we need. Support can then be provided by volunteers.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
IBM and Novell lost their business area because competition shut them off. Also, the irony here is it's largely Microsoft who did that.
In order for that to happen to Windows, you need serious competition on the PC desktop. Not on servers or databases, on desktops. And there are ZERO viable candidates except maybe OSX by a long shot. You are fighting the wrong battle there.
>Things are shifting but some people aren't noticing or believing.
Things shift when there is a force shifting them; things don't shift just because you wish them.
And no one in Windows-centric IT shops want to admit that the vast majority of internet and databases out there are running on Linux servers and services.
Yes, but Windows internet services have been growing at a flat rate for the past 5 years. Still small percentage wise, but growing none-the-less and in the top 500 to boot.
This de facto OpenGL Linux implementation now supports the several year old OpenGL 3.1 specification for Intel hardware while the other OPEN SOURCE drivers are still at OpenGL 3.0 or worse.
FTFY.
Android runs on top of linux.
More importantly... Nouveau is starting to become performance competitive with the Nvidia Binary Blob. As Mesa adds features and rapidly catches upto the closed drivers, it'll surpass them for performance if not features. The time is coming quickly when the drivers built into Linux will be better than the official ones.
I can't wait to use that OpenGL compliant hardware acceleration, GLX, pbuffers, framebuffer objects, GLSL, and redirected rendering that Mes... Oh wait... If you've ever actually had to deal with graphics, you'd know it's a fucking nightmare on Linux. Mesa always has been, and probably always will be, a huge fail.
Go find a Linux driver. I think I prefer to stay Windows. Maybe you'll find someone else to help you. Maybe Mesa... THAT WAS A JOKE. Haha. FAT CHANCE. Anyway,Windows 7 is great. It's so delicious and moist.
At the level of a graphics driver, a driver for Android is pretty much necessarily a Linux driver. It is vanishingly unlikely to be an Xorg driver(which is presumably why so many of these 'run stock arm distribution on android device!' schemes end up doing something ghastly with VNC), but it will have to interact with a kernel that is largely-though-not-100% a Linux kernel.
Yeah. Totally "F* you" for providing a rock-stable and blazing-fast driver supporting all the lastest OpenGL specs, with OpenCL support from day one and not 4 years late, while the high-and-mighty opensource drivers are buggy as hell for all the cards less than 5 years old, support OpenGL revision that's 1.2 release versions behind, and achieve about half of the performance of Windows drivers. I feel for you mate.
Except, not really.
Mesa is an open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification - a system for rendering interactive 3D graphics.
The Mesa 3D Graphics Library
I've always been a bit confused on exactly what Mesa is. Is it just software OpenGL? I'm using an ATI card with a hardware accelerated OpenGL driver. Does Mesa still have a role in that setup somewhere?
Android runs on top of a forked version of Linux.
Or hundreds of forks of Linux.
this is relevant only if the year is 2012 and when linux still tried to run grafics-matrices-math on x86 processors ... .. THAT was fun!
methinks amdti(tm) (pronounced "AM-TIE") and nvidia have their "own" libraries that implement (allow access to? offload?) openGL onto THEIR non-x86 processors?
emulating a soundblaster thru the internal pc-speaker
Yes, damned nVidia for having OpenGL 4.3 in a stable driver the day OpenGL 4.3 is finalized. How dare they be better than AMD/Intel/Matrox/everyone else!!!oneone
+1
"Good people drink good beer"
Cool story, bro.
autodesk: 3dsmax 2013 BUT hey we'll sell it to you at nearly half off for 8500....
ya know what that encourages....me pirating it and then using it till im so good at it someone hires me and/or invests enough in me i can legally buy it and off i go.....
thus you get a guy whose pissed off about having to pay that kinda a crap for start up.....and whom will then sit back on disability for the next ten years doing as much as he can for free jsut to bone dry the whole industry....
but you also have customers used to the fact that 'Product X is only supported on RHEL Antiquated Edition with Nvidia Drivers v.Y'.
This is not limited to Linux. With Windows, the situation is very similar. You are usually on your own with the latest and greatest drivers. Software support for the later drivers comes only after the next major release of the design package.
Totally "F* you" for providing a rock-stable and blazing-fast driver...
Stop trolling. NVidia was the first company to refuse to provide adequate documentation needed for developing those opensource drivers, and other companies followed. They're basically the reason why those opensource drivers are now 5 years behind the state of the art. So yeah, fuck 'em.
Oh, and their drivers are buggy as hell.
Then why do they work? I know AMD and Intel gets fair share of application developer time to fix all the bugs so that morons get your OpenGL and not semi-random pixel noise if anything. On the other hand, I have not heard that nVidia needs this special treatment because they actually get their OpenGL (nearly) perfect.