Re: fallback mode vs llvmpipe rendering

[Antoine Jacoutot <ajacoutot gnome org>]

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 10:27:13PM +0200, Olav Vitters wrote:
> For what reason do they use fallback mode? Not being able to run GNOME
> shell, or not liking GNOME shell?

The immediate reason is that they need a coherent Desktop on all their different hardware. And we cannot guarantee hardware 3D rendering will be available for all video chipsets.
On OpenBSD with have DRM (1) support for Intel and most of the Radeon cards. Of course we advocate avoiding NVidia and any kind of unsupported hardware but when it's already there...
Hence our llvmpipe effort on this platform.

> > I know BSDs aren't of real interest for the GNOME Project but it works
> > amazingly well (on x86, x86-64 and powerpc). We have people working on
> > llvmpipe/gallium/kms support for OpenBSD but it takes time since we
> > are not a large-scale project.
> 
> llvmpipe is (IMO) something that should only be used because nothing
> else works. You don't want to rely on llvmpipe by default.

Well we kind of do for anything that is not supported by our opensource accelerated drivers.

> In case hardware rendering is not working nicely, any timeframe when
> that would change or not?

I expect to have the pieces required by gnome-shell and other clutter consumers after GNOME 3.6 is out, so I'd say roughly 4 months.

-- 
Antoine