[Arm-netbook] Mali at fosdem

[lkcl luke]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 10:43 PM, Alec Ari <neotheuser at ymail.com> wrote:
>> Message: 7
>> Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:04:26 +0000
>> From: lkcl luke <luke.leighton at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Arm-netbook] Mali at fosdem
>> To: Linux on small ARM machines <arm-netbook at lists.phcomp.co.uk>
>> Message-ID:
>
>> On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 8:39 AM, Alejandro Mery <amery at geeks.cl>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > code released! https://gitorious.org/lima/lima/trees/master
>>
>>  suuupeeeeerrrrb.
>>
>
> I read that the ultimate goal for Lima is to work and plug into Gallium. I'm excited to see the code published, but out of plain curiosity, why wasn't the MALI driver written with Mesa/Gallium in mind at the start?

 i've seen a brief explanation on #lima - the architecture of gallium
simply doesn't comprehend shaders, specifically shader compilers
(whatever they are).  thus it just... doesn't fit, and therefore the
simplest thing to do initially is bypass the whole lot, and come back
to gallium later.

 btw although i understood what you said about shaders being "mini
ALUs/CPUs", gordan, i still don't grok what they're actually _for_.
why do you need a group of parallel "shader" processors in the first
place (as opposed to a general-purpose SMP CPU with a stonking-great
DSP up its arse)?  what the hell are the damn things doing? :)

 l.