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by boarush 1301 days ago
I believe they're calling it Day 1 in the sense that the devs themselves are saying a lot of it is hacked together and not daily driver material for most of the users. A lot of releases and revisions before this is even upstreamed.
1 comments
charcircuit 1301 days ago
When talking about impressive performance of a "day 1" build I feel there is a difference between new drivers and new ports of existing drivers.
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rowanG077 1301 days ago
This isn't a port of an existing driver. It's completely new Kernel space + user space driver. Of course it makes use of the mesa "framework" but that doesn't mean the driver is 27 years old.
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charcircuit 1301 days ago
What do you think porting a driver to a completely new GPU means? Doing so will require new kernel space and user space code. The existence of these new components doesn't mean there is a completely new graphics driver. Only parts of it that are platform specific are new.

The graphics driver of a system spans from a talking to the hardware to exposing a graphics API such as OpenGL or Vulkan for applications to use. Splitting up the graphics driver into separate components and calling each component a driver is different from what I mean when I am referring to a driver.

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xx_ns 1301 days ago
Mesa isn't a driver. Mesa is just an abstraction on top of the software that DRIVES the hardware (a driver), which is being written from scratch. Nobody (including the Asahi developers) but you subscribes to your definition of a driver. Drivers implementing Mesa may share next to nothing in common, so no, it's not a "port".
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est31 1301 days ago
The ashahi driver inside Mesa builds upon Gallium3D so it does use shared components of the Mesa library stack. This is not a from scratch driver, it's one that uses the powers of the Mesa library.
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bdhcuidbebe 1301 days ago
Correct. But this is a new driver.
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charcircuit 1301 days ago
Part of the driver is new, but part of it is just existing code that is part of Mesa.
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rowanG077 1300 days ago
So... It's a new driver. You don't say a program written days ago in C89 is 33 years old because the programs uses the c89 standard library.
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