Gallium3D Documentation

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About

Gallium3D is Tungsten Graphics' new architecture for building 3D graphics drivers. Initially supporting Mesa and Linux graphics drivers, Gallium3D is designed to allow portability to all major operating systems and graphics interfaces.

Compared to existing Linux graphics drivers, Gallium3D will:

• Make drivers smaller and simpler. Current DRI drivers are rather complicated. They're large, contain duplicated code and are burdened with implementing many concepts tightly tied to the OpenGL 1.x/2.x API.

• Model modern graphics hardware. The new driver architecture is an abstraction of modern graphics hardware, rather than an OpenGL->hardware translator. The new driver interface will assume the presence of programmable vertex/fragment shaders and flexible memory objects.

• Support multiple graphics APIs. The OpenGL 3.0 API will be very different from OpenGL 1.x/2.x. We'd like a driver model that is API-neutral so that it's not tied to a specific graphics API.

Contents

• Overview

• The State Tracker

• Pipe drivers:
  • Softpipe Driver
  • Simple i915 Driver
  • Simple 965 driver (brw_context.h, brw_winsys.h)
  • Cell driver (cell_context.h, cell_winsys.h)
  • Failover Module

• Winsys drivers:
  • X11 winsys driver (xm_winsys.c)
  • Intel DRI winsys driver (intel_context.h, intel_winsys_pipe.c)

• Ancillary Modules:
  • Draw Module
  • TGSI
    • LLVM TGSI backend (gallivm.h)

• Glxgears callgraph example

External documentation

• Gallium3D's Architectural Overview
• Technical Overview
• Gallium3D talk from XDS 2007

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