Ok, I'll bite. Partly because I think gallium looks like the most fascinating thing in 3D graphics to date, but also because what I can find on wikipedia, the various blogs and the tungsten site doesn't really explain things in terms clear to "spectator fan boys" like me :P
On Friday 24 July 2009 21:40:25 Keith Whitwell wrote: > I think a fast software rasterizer project would be better described as > "create a gallium driver targetting LLVM" (as opposed to optimizing > softpipe), as softpipe fills a pretty useful niche in its current form. > > Thinking of LLVM as "the hardware" has a couple of positive > psychological implications -- most importanly that we are in the > business of programming LLVM to do rasterization, rather than just using > it to provide some niche fastpaths in an otherwise complete software > rasterizer. Does this approach mean that the softpipe will only handle missing functionality for hardware that is fixed function, and then the llvm-rasterizer will do the heavy lifting for "stupid" hardware like i945? > Below a certain level (be it triangle or batch of quads or even vertex > buffer), everything should be handled by LLVM-generated code, in the > same way we would hand off to hardware at a given level... (assuming my above question answers yes) Is this to say that triangle setup is to be done with fpu instructions, and then let LLVM express the rasterization with sse[1/2/3] code? Naturally I ask because I am concerned with efficient register utilization. > There at least four key places where we want to generate code (TGSI > shaders are only one of them), and we want to choose plumbing between > them which is optimal for however llvm turns out to require it -- all of > which means that in such a driver LLVM won't be hidden behind shader > opcodes, but will be completely in the foreground. The [at least] three remaining ones being? Thanks for your time /Anders ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Mesa3d-dev mailing list Mesa3d-dev@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mesa3d-dev
