Mesa 9.0 Released With Open Source OpenGL 3.1 Drivers 79
An anonymous reader writes "The Mesa developers released Mesa 9.0 with open-source OpenGL 3.1 driver support. This de facto OpenGL Linux implementation now supports the several year old OpenGL 3.1 specification for Intel hardware while the other drivers are still at OpenGL 3.0 or worse. Other features to Mesa 9.0 include completing MPEG1/MPEG2 video acceleration, early OpenCL support, bug-fixes, and new hardware support."
OpenGL 3.1 support is limited to Intel hardware, but at least ATI/AMD hardware supports some of OpenGL 3.1. A few features from OpenGL 4 were also added.
Mesa Same As Me (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdotty as I can be,
Loving software free,
Cleanshaven, save goatee.
Burma Shave
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Re:Mesa Same As Me (Score:4, Informative)
Cleanshaven, save goatee.
I accidentally read this as goatse. Not. the. same.
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thats how i read it the first time too.
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At one time, I thought that there should be a fork of Mesa: Maybe "Black Mesa". (That was a joke, ha ha, fat chance)
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Mesa same as me,
Please stop confusing non-Americans. I thought this was a Jar Jar Binks reference.
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Americans should have
(and this ain't no ruse)
A monopoly
On being confused...?
BURMA SHAVE.
Switching to the Linux (Score:1)
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Autodesk dominates the closed source 3D market much like Adobe dominates the closed source 2D market. Other people don't try to enter the market because it is bloody hard to write software which can compete with these products. Even Microsoft bought Softimage at a point then gave up and sold them off to Avid. Today Softimage is owned by... Autodesk. Autodesk, not content with having 3D Studio, bought Softimage and Maya. Today there is little competition left. There are lots of patents in the area but I don
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There has been no strong push to provide alternatives for the Adobe-applications, so why would there be anything such now all of a sudden? I do not see the situation changing for years to come.
What? Never heard of the GIMP for bitmap drawing or Inkscape for vectorial drawing? IMO Inkscape is superior to Illustrator. I even use it in Windows.
The situation is more dire for video editing where there are several programs with somewhat laughable feature sets like you would see in entry/mid level video editi
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But as I said, there is no actual PUSH to provide alternatives to the Adobe software stack, and even many GIMP developers themselves don't view GIMP as an alternative to Photoshop so much as an entirely different thing altogether.
So what? That's the first common misconception about FLOSS and 'other' software in general. Linux does not try to be Windows replacement, GIMP does not try to be a Photoshop replacement, Evolution does not try to be an Outlook replacement and so on and on...if you stop seeing "replacements" and start seeing independent software projects instead, it will make your life easier. Sure, some or most of them have the same area of interest, but most FLOS software does not try to be a drop-in replacement, they try
Re:Switching to the Linux (Score:4, Informative)
Um. What? Seriously, what?
.. the lack of usable, powerful equivalents [that don't require an engineering degree or at least mindset in order to learn how to use, like software such as Blender] to such applications as:
This
There are some shining examples [look for an audio NLE on linux and there are several very decent competitive options to programs like Vegas, Audition, Sound Forge, etc., or check out Inkscape for graphic design] as well of course, but there are various reasons why those may not be suitable solutions too [such as the multitude of choices on linux of who-knows-how-well-they're supported low-latency audio driver subsystems which may make required things like synchronous multitracking impossible with a given piece of equipment or even particular distro].
I occasionally teach uni [mostly arts] how to use graphic design / video / audio software; many can't afford Macs [where the Adobe applications and other stable equivalents already exist and credulous, uneducated users aren't even aware of or simply don't care about the walled-garden[s] that will affect what they can do with their own hardware] and among those who can't, the majority would like nothing more than to switch away from using Windows.
My observation of reasons for resistance to the adoption of linux by the sections of the populace that I deal with on a regular basis [musicians, videographers, video/audio editors, graphic artists, photographers, professional academics of many stripe[s], writers, etc.] are thus:
I have helped a number of people [including both children and seniors] switch to linux, but their usage profiles are pretty uniform: they're content consumers, not p
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Well, Wine is always an option. Photoshop runs in Wine without a problem.
Additionally, one of the most important graphics production applications, Autodesk's Maya, runs natively on Linux and has absolutely no difference from the Windows version.
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Both GIMP and Inkscape are far far away from Adobe products. It's worth to pay extra USD 1K for application that will save your time, brain and achieve perfect results.
Unfortunately
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how many slashdot readers have an extra $1,000 laying around to blow on software? I don't.
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Perhaps the importance of opening up will be noted (Score:5, Insightful)
More and more as home computing becomes about appliances instead of about general purpose PCs and more and more, different detail markets are looking to Linux to make these things happen, video chip makers who have bet most of their business on Microsoft-only support will soon need to rethink that notion.
Long ago, no one thought IBM could be humbled. No one could have imagined Novell becoming a novelty. And no one in Windows-centric IT shops want to admit that the vast majority of internet and databases out there are running on Linux servers and services.
Things are shifting but some people aren't noticing or believing.
F* You NVidia... F* You.
Re:Perhaps the importance of opening up will be no (Score:4, Interesting)
I get the impression(whether this is better or worse is another question) that makers of video chipsets understand that Linux support is necessary to win certain markets(embedded Android stuff, *nix graphic workstations, compute clusters, etc.); but that "support" does not need to mean anything other than 'set of binary blobs that work with the one blessed kernel version and system configuration. If you are the purchaser of a consumer product, suck it up. If you have a suitably large enterprise support account, please contact our engineering/integration team.'
In the 'appliance' market, you aren't even supposed to touch the software, just twiddle the 'apps' on top of it, and much of the hardware(even when the components are well understood and fairly standard) is overtly hostile to tinkering. Yes, the chipset vendor had better have a Linux BSP if they want to make a sale; but(based on the state of 3rd-party Android ROMs), they definitely don't have to do it in a way that is overly helpful to 3rd parties.
In the expensive Workstation and Compute Stuff market, you have customers who will pay good money, sometimes excellent money, to Make It Work; but you also have customers used to the fact that 'Product X is only supported on RHEL Antiquated Edition with Nvidia Drivers v.Y'.
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I hope that it doesn't stop at just Linux support. I'm actually OK with there being proprietary drivers as long as documentation is available so that we can build open drivers as well. In an ideal world all drivers are open.
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At the level of a graphics driver, a driver for Android is pretty much necessarily a Linux driver. It is vanishingly unlikely to be an Xorg driver(which is presumably why so many of these 'run stock arm distribution on android device!' schemes end up doing something ghastly with VNC), but it will have to interact with a kernel that is largely-though-not-100% a Linux kernel.
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+1
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Totally "F* you" for providing a rock-stable and blazing-fast driver...
Stop trolling. NVidia was the first company to refuse to provide adequate documentation needed for developing those opensource drivers, and other companies followed. They're basically the reason why those opensource drivers are now 5 years behind the state of the art. So yeah, fuck 'em.
Oh, and their drivers are buggy as hell.
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You mean using the proprietary firmware?
(captcha: depress)
As much as I dislike binary blobs, the dirty little not-terribly-secret is that most 'peripherals' of any significant complexity have firmware, it's just a question of whether they store it onboard or have just enough in nonvolatile storage to have the blob transferred to them by their driver on power-up.
In the video case, Intel's "Video BIOS" shares flash space with the rest of the (proprietary and not very replaceable unless your board is one of the rare birds supported by coreboot) goo in your motherboar
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When I see a 2.6 MB kernel module (for fglrx; I recall Nvidia's being closer to 9 MB), my assumption is that it is mostly code that executes on the host. Code or data that gets loaded onto the peripheral can easily live in a file, or in a executable section that gets discarded after use. Given how specialized the devices are, how much translation and optimization is needed to convert application-level APIs to hardware operations, and the fact that the vendors have begged off on providing host-side source
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I think that we are talking about two different things:
If you use the Free AMD/ATI graphics drivers, you get only the most basic functions unless you provide a proprietary firmware blob. (debian package containing those firmware blobs, among others [debian.org]).
For those device firmwares, the entire "RADEON" directory, covering all supported models(list is in the debian package, I won't clutter this post) is 260k across 41 different firmware files.
As you note, though, fglrx and Nvidia's equivalent modules(plus all the
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I'd like to know what the hell does matter to you if this isn't good enough nerd news.
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what the fuck is mesa?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_(computer_graphics) [wikipedia.org]
why do i care?
I rather doubt you care at all.
why does this matter?
To you? I doubt it does.
oh right, this is slashdot.
apple rules!
microsoft drools!
samsung is evil!
foxconn!
obama!
timothy!
Seek help and get on medication. I am not saying this as a put down, this is advice from someone who has sought help. I now make pretty much double what I used to make before I sought help if that might help motivate you. You don't have to deal with your problems on your own, and the correct medication can make a world of difference.
More importantly... (Score:4, Funny)
Still Alive (Score:1, Funny)
What the hell is Mesa? (Score:5, Informative)
Mesa is an open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification - a system for rendering interactive 3D graphics.
The Mesa 3D Graphics Library [mesa3d.org]
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It is a software implementation of OpenGL, but it now also provides the libGL glue to various hardware acceleration drivers. So it does have a role on most Xorg systems. An exception is the Nvidia proprietary infrastructure (which replaces large portions of the normal 3D graphics stack).