Gallium3D

Gallium3D is a software library for 3D graphics acceleration being developed by Tungsten Graphics, an engineering company with expertise in Linux and open-source graphics technologies. Gallium 3D operates between the graphics API and the operating system with the primary goal of making driver development easier, bundling otherwise duplicated code of several different drivers at a single point. This is done by providing a better division of labour (for example, leaving memory management to the kernel DRI driver) and to support modern hardware architectures.

Gallium3D provides a unified API exposing standard hardware functions such as shader units found on modern hardware. Thus, 3D APIs such as OpenGL 1.x/2.x, OpenGL 3.x, OpenVG, GPGPU infrastructure or even Direct3D (as found in the Wine compatibility layer) will need only a single back-end, called state tracker, targeting Gallium3D API. By contrast Mesa 3D requires a different backend for each hardware platform, and several other APIs need translation to OpenGL at the expense of further overhead. [Cite web
url = http://www.tungstengraphics.com/technologies/gallium3d.html
title = TG-Gallium3D
publisher = Tungsten Graphics
lang = en
accessdate = 2008-04-01] [Cite web
url = http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2008/02/gpgpu.html
title = GPGPU
author = zrusin
lang = en
datepublished = 2008-02-06
accessdate = 2008-04-01] [Cite web
url = http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2008/02/openvg-and-accelerating-2d.html
title = OpenVG and accelerating 2D
author = zrusin
lang = en
datepublished = 2008-02-07
accessdate = 2008-04-01] In addition, using the modular structure of Gallium3D, there are works underway to leverage the LLVM compiler suite and create a module to optimize shader code on the fly. [Cite web
url = http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2007/11/gallium3d-llvm.html
title = Gallium3D LLVM
author = zrusin
lang = en
datepublished = 2007-11-02
accessdate = 2008-04-01]

Under Gallium3D, DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) kernel drivers will manage the memory, and DRI (Direct Rendering Interface) driver (now called DRI2) will be more GPU processing oriented. This will resolve memory management problems whose solutions are considered infeasible under Mesa 3D. [Cite web
url = http://wiki.x.org/wiki/DRI2
title = DRI2
lang = en
datepublished = 2007-10-04
accessdate = 2008-04-01]

Current status

The first implemented and already partially working drivers are Cell and Intel GPU drivers. Work is done on ATI Radeon cards providing a skeleton driver [Cite web
url = http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=gallium3d_update&num=2
title = Gallium3D Status Update Q1'08
publisher = Phoronix
author = Michael Larabel
page = 2
lang = en
datepublished = 2008-02-24
accessdate = 2008-04-01] , and the Nouveau team is moving development to Gallium3D, including a solution for older fixed function nVidia cards which lack programmable shaders. [Cite web
url = http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/Nouveau_Companion_36
title = Nouveau Companion 36
lang = en
datepublished = 2008-03-07
accessdate = 2008-04-01] [Cite web
url = http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/Nouveau_Companion_37
title = Nouveau Companion 37
lang = en
datepublished = 2008-03-21
accessdate = 2008-04-01]

As of 2008-07-13 Nouveau development is done exclusively for the Gallium framework. The old DRI driver was removed from the master branch of the mesa repository on Freedesktop.org. [Cite web
url = http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=93115c4b235896df097b91edec7458a8a4488c4e
title = nouveau: say goodbye to the old DRI driver... (cgit on FDO)
lang = en
datepublished = 2008-07-13]

External links

* [http://mesa3d.sourceforge.net/ Mesa 3D official page]
* [http://www.tungstengraphics.com/technologies/gallium3d.html Gallium3D Tungstengraphics page]
* [http://www.tungstengraphics.com/wiki/files/gallium3d-xds2007.pdf Functional diagrams of Gallium3D]
* [http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/?h=gallium-0.1 Gallium-0.1 branch git repository] on Freedesktop cgit.
* [http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/?h=gallium-0.2 Gallium-0.2 branch git repository] on Freedesktop cgit.
* [http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2007/09/gallium3d.html An article on Gallium3D] by Zack Rusin
* [http://lwn.net/Articles/257417/ LWN article]
* [http://stecchino.blip.tv/file/1181861/ Presentation about Gallium3D] (video from Akademy 2008)
* [http://www.bitblit.org/gsoc/g3dvl/ BitBlit.org: Generic GPU-Accelerated Video Decoding] (GSoC project using Gallium)
* [http://llvm.org/ Low Level Virtual Machine] (Dynamic recompiler backend used by Gallium)

References