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Hello, |
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VIDEO_CARDS is an annoying mess. We used to have radeon, intel, and |
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some others in media-libs/mesa's VIDEO_CARDS. radeon and intel |
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corresponded to disparate sets of drivers -- VIDEO_CARDS=radeon has |
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meant classic r100, r200, r300, and r600 drivers and gallium r600 and |
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radeonsi drivers. VIDEO_CARDS=intel has meant classic i915 and i965 |
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drivers as well as gallium i915. |
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|
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I added more-specific VIDEO_CARDS for those separate drivers a few |
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years ago, so that users could set VIDEO_CARDS="radeon radeonsi" and |
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only get the one radeonsi driver they actually wanted while still |
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enabling support for x11-libs/libdrm's radeon support code which is |
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used by most of those radeon drivers. Of course some users want this |
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control and others don't care at all. |
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The confusion comes in with "classic" DRI drivers vs Gallium drivers. |
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The Gallium abstraction layer allows a hardware driver to handle |
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multiple APIs -- OpenGL, D3D9, OpenCL, video decode APIs, etc. For |
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instance, users try to build the classic i965 driver (there is no |
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Gallium driver for this hardware) with USE=opencl or USE=vaapi and |
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don't understand why they didn't get what they wanted (or REQUIRED_USE |
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prevents them from doing so). |
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|
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Should of Mesa's USE flags, d3d9, llvm, lm_sensors, opencl, openmax, |
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unwind, vaapi, vdpau, xa, and xvmc are Gallium-only. Should I make a |
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USE_EXPAND for Gallium-only options to attempt to avoid confusion? |
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Another point of confusion: not all Gallium drivers support all of |
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these features. For instance only the r600 and radeonsi drivers |
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support OpenCL. How to best handle this? |
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It seems like at one extreme you build an extensive set of |
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REQUIRED_USE conditions that force users to micromanage their USE |
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flags, or you let them enable all sorts of impossible combinations and |
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deal with the confused bug reports. |
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I would like to somehow get rid of the 'classic' and 'gallium' USE |
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flags entirely, but I'm not totally sure how. Maybe I can enable them |
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dependent on VIDEO_CARDS... |
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Suggestions welcome. |
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