ARM as a primary architecture

[Adam Jackson]

On Wed, 2012-03-21 at 10:38 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Peter Robinson (pbrobinson at gmail.com) said: 
> > That's my point, I don't believe that working 3D should be a blocker
> > to primary arch because like mainline it will likely come with both
> > time and demand.
> 
> Is llvmpipe not 'working'? (Admittedly, on low-power CPUs like ARM, it might
> be more of a burden.)

llvmpipe should work on arm - I've not tried - but I suspect it needs a
modest amount of surgery to perform adequately.  Much of its performance
on x86 comes from swizzling the pixel layout around internally so it
nicely matches up with SSE2's register layout, which probably isn't
quite what arm gives you to work with.

Oh, yeah, and software floating point would be brutal.  Nobody is
surprised.

The ARM GPUs are pretty simple though.  The nice thing about not
pretending to implement full GL is you don't have to implement all the
garbage parts of GL.  And you're really going to be much happier with an
RE'd driver than with llvmpipe.  Like I say, mesa-dev@ is -> that way.

- ajax
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