Fedora 12 Graphics Issues: Cancel F13 and concentrate on fixing F12 ?

[Dave Airlie]

On Fri, 2009-11-27 at 17:02 -0600, Sir Gallantmon wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 4:01 PM, Rahul Sundaram
> <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>         On 11/28/2009 03:26 AM, Felix Miata wrote:
>         
>         > 3D requires more dead dinosaurs, coal and/or other sources
>         of
>         > electrical energy than 2D to produce. I don't expect that to
>         change, and even
>         > if it does, using more than necessary will remain a wasteful
>         allocation of
>         > quickly diminishing global resources. Consequently, "enabled
>         by default" will
>         > be ecologically irresponsible if it does come to pass.
>         
>         
>         Huh? Your perspective just seems very odd.  In a year, if we
>         don't have
>         a composited desktop by default in Fedora, I would be very
>         very
>         surprised. Just watch.
>         
>         Rahul
>         
>         
>         
> 
> 
> I actually would be surprised if we had a composited desktop in Fedora
> by default in a year. Maybe if the radical changes going on in Mesa's
> master tree weren't going on, that wouldn't be surprising. However,
> with the Gallium work, I seriously doubt that we will have composited
> desktop by default next year.
> 
> 
> Also, it would be nice if in a repo with experimental graphics
> drivers, the gallium drivers could be made available. Gallium will
> soon be the way that VMware offers accelerated 3D for Linux guests
> since they contributed a gallium driver. Given that, I think it should
> get some exposure to the rest of the Fedora community to get stuff
> tested. Gallium isn't totally broken, last I heard. In fact, I think
> the ATi gallium driver is supposed to be at least partially working. 

Packaging gallium drivers doesn't give us anything useful at the moment.

Everything else required to run them is in the distro, the overhead
of git cloning mesa and following instructions to get a gallium driver
is the least of using those drivers worries.

The problem with packaging anything like the current gallium drivers
is the rate of change is too high, that by the time you've built the
package in koji, its already out of date and possibly useless.

It would require someone staying on top of it full time for little
benefit to Fedora or to the gallium driver writers who would need
you to have the git tree so you could test patches etc.

Dave.