[Libre-soc-dev] Introduction

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2021 at 2:58 PM Jules Penuchot <jules at penuchot.com> wrote:

> On 3/13/21 2:52 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:

> > http://lists.libre-soc.org/pipermail/libre-soc-dev/2021-March/002089.html
> >
> > it's a progressive series of steps that has some interesting side-effects:
> > a general-purpose software-rendered 3D MESA driver is one of them.
>
> I'm looking into it thanks! I'm scanning through this to get an idea of
> what the whole project is all about.

basically, we're not doing "totally separate GPU totally separate ISA
connect over shared-memory do some insane full-blown
Inter-Process-System with massive queues and god knows what else"

instead:

1) the shader is compiled.
2) the 3D instructions are ***NATIVE*** to the CPU.

not, "native to a foreign GPU where the main CPU driver has to
communicate with a competely alien system over shared memory"

consequently, we are *actually* adding *actual* 3D opcodes to
OpenPOWER, *and* adding predication, *and* adding Vectorisation, *and*
adding Swizzle, *and* adding vec2/3/4 *and* adding Matrix operations
and many more.

but because this has never been done before, none of the existing
Vulkan MESA drivers are of any use to us, and neither is google
SwiftShader.

therefore we need an incremental approach.

> > i'll let vivek respond: if you're happy with the plan then we can move to
> > the next step(s), are you happy with the Charter, you've found the mailing
> > list already, etc. etc.
> >
> > warmest,
>
> Happy with the plan, happy with the charter, thanks for the info!

excellent, ok so when you're ready send me an ssh public key.

you can get set up with these:
https://git.libre-soc.org/?p=dev-env-setup.git;a=blob;f=install-mesa-apt-reqs;hb=HEAD
https://git.libre-soc.org/?p=dev-env-setup.git;a=blob;f=lsoc-mesa-dev-env-setup;hb=HEAD

that will save you a lot of time

l.