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Mesa's Highlights Reel: An Impressive Year For Open Source 3-D Drivers

Posted by timothy on from the just-a-fad-I'm-sure dept.

Michael Larabel at Phoronix has been assiduously reporting on some of the small advancements in open source 3-D graphics; in aggregate, those small advancements make for big improvements in hardware (and platform) support, as well as higher performance. Phoronix published today a year-end wrap-up highlighting some of the ways that Mesa has developed; it's quite a list. An excerpt: This time last year core Mesa and the drivers were still limited to OpenGL 3.3 compliance while in 2015 we've seen core Mesa reach up to OpenGL 4.2 support. The AMD RadeonSI and R600g drivers have raised up through OpenGL 4.1 (though R600g is limited in what supports GL4) and the Nouveau NVC0 driver is at OpenGL 4.1 as well. The Intel Mesa driver is still at OpenGL 3.3, but they are extremely close to OpenGL 4.2 and should hit that milestone in early 2016 after having been recently focusing up on OpenGL ES 3.1 support, which they did achieve this year. Besides tackling more GL4 support, Mesa this year has seen the new VirtIO GPU driver for 3D support in guest VMs, continued work on the new Raspberry Pi 3D driver (VC4), video encode/decode improvements, and other Gallium3D state tracker highlights.

1 of 27 comments (clear)

  1. I'd like to use Linux, but I can't due to systemd. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I think it's fantastic to see this kind of progress being made. I was a dedicated Linux user from 1998 until about a year ago. Nothing pleases me more than to see the Linux and open source ecosystem advancing so quickly, like we are seeing here.

    But that brings me to the problem: I was a Linux user.

    After so many years of using Debian, I ran into severe problems when they forced systemd on me, without giving me a reliable way to not use it. I wouldn't even care if systemd was in Debian, as along as I wasn't subjected to it, ever. But that isn't the case.

    I know I'm not alone. I've read many of the many mailing list postings, forum postings, and bug reports from other exasperated victims of systemd. Linux has been rendered unusable for a while swath of users. We don't care if our systems boot up 0.25 seconds faster than with sysvinit. But we do care when our systems don't boot at all because of some stupid problem with systemd. It's even more frustrating when we can't easily debug it because of systemd's binary logging.

    I'd love to take advantage of these 3D advances. But that requires X starting. And X starting requires Linux to boot. And Linux booting fully requires the init system to perform well. When the init system frequently causes problems, then the rest of the fantastic open source software is rendered unusable!

    I've moved to OS X for now, but I would love to go back to Linux. Yet with all of the major distros using systemd, I'm left in a quandary. I can't justify using a niche distro, because I don't know if it'll still be around to provide security updates next week. I don't want to use Slackware, because I want to use 2015 Linux, not 1998 Linux. I can't use Gentoo because I don't want to compile all of the software from scratch on my laptop.

    So while these Mesa 3D advances would be very useful to me, at the same time they're totally useless because they're inaccessible thanks to what systemd has done to make Linux unusable for me and many others.