Graphics drivers

There are only two tasks harder than writing Free Software graphics drivers. One is running a successful crocodile petting zoo, the other is wireless bungee jumping.

In general writing graphics drivers is hard. The number of people who can actually do it is very small and the ones who can do it well are usually doing it full-time already. Unless the company, which those folks are working for, supports open drivers, the earliest someone can start working on open drivers is the day the hardware is officially available. That's already about 2 years too late, maybe a year if the hardware is just an incremental update. Obviously not a lot of programmers have the motivation to do that. Small subset of the already very small subset of programmers who can write drivers. Each of them worth their weight in gold (double, since they're usually pretty skinny).

Vendors who ship hardware with GNU/Linux don't see a lot of value in having open graphics drivers on those platforms. All the Android phones are a good example of that. Then again Android decided to use Skia, which right now is simply the worst of the vector graphics frameworks out there (Qt and Cairo being two other notables). Plus having to wrap every new game port (all that code is always C/C++) with NDK is a pain. So the lack of decent drivers is probably not their biggest problem.

MeeGo has a lot better graphics framework, but we're ways of before we'll see anyone shipping devices running it and Nokia in the past did "awesome" things like release GNU/Linux devices with a GPU but without any drivers for it (n800, n810) and Intel's Poulsbo/Moorestown graphics drivers woes are well-known. On the desktop side it seems that Intel folks are afraid that porting their drivers to Gallium will destabilize them. Which is certainly true, but the benefits of doing so (multiple state trackers, cleaner driver code, being able to use Gallium debugging tools like trace/replay/rbug and nicely abstracting the api code from drivers) would be well worth it and hugely beneficial to everyone.

As it stands we have an excellent framework in Gallium3D but not a lot of open drivers for it. Ironically it's our new software driver, llvmpipe, or more precisely a mutation of it, which has the potential to fix some of our GPU issues in the future. With the continues generalization of GPUs my hope is that all we'll need is DRM code (memory management, kernel modesetting, command submission) and LLVM->GPU code generator. It's not exactly a trivial amount of code by any stretch of the imagination but smaller than what we'd need right now and once it would be done for one or two GPUs it would certainly become a lot simpler. Plus GPGPU will eventually make the latter part mandatory anyway. Having that would get us a working driver right away and after that we could play with texture sampling and vertex paths (which will likely stay as dedicated units for a while) as optimizations.

Of course it would be even better if a company shipping millions of devices with GNU/Linux wanted a working graphics stack from bottom up (memory management, kernel modesetting, Gallium drivers with multiple state trackers, optimized for whatever 2D framework they use) but that would make sense. "Is that bad?" you ask. Oh, it's terrible because GNU/Linux graphics stack on all those shipped devices is apparently meant to defy logic.

No hands!

I've spent the last few weeks in London with Keith Whitwell and José Fonseca, the greatest computer graphics experts since the guy who invented the crystal ball in the Lord of the Rings, the one that allowed you to see your future in full immersive 3D. Which begs the question: do you think that there was an intermediate step to those? I mean a crystal ball that showed you your future but 2D, all pixelated and in monochrome. Like Pong. You got 8x8 pixels and then the wizard/witch really needed to get their shit together to figure out what's going on, e.g.

- "This seems to be the quintessential good news/bad news kind of a scenario: good news - you'll be having sex! Bad news - with a hippo.",

- "There's no hippos in Canada...",

- "Right, right, I see how that could be a problem. How about elephants with no trunks?",

- "None of those",

- "Walls maybe?",

- "Yea, got those",

- "Excellent! Well then you'll probably walk into a one.".

Just once I'd like to see a movie where they're figuring this stuff out. If you'll shoot it, I'll write it!

Getting back on track: we've got a lot of stuff done. I've worked mainly on the Gallium interface trying to update it a bit for modern hardware and APIs.

First of all I've finally fixed geometry shaders in our software driver. The interface for geometry shader is quite simple, but the implementation is a bit involved and I've never done it properly. Until now that is. In particular emitting multiple primitives from a single geometry shader never worked properly. Adjacency primitives never worked. Drawing indexed vertex buffer with a geometry shader never worked properly and texture sampling in GS was just never implemented. All of that is fixed and looks very solid.

Second of all stream out, aka transform feedback is in. Both in terms of interface additions and software implementation. Being able to process a set of vertices and stream them out into a buffer is a very useful feature. I still enjoy vector graphics and in there processing a set of data points is a very common operation.

I've also added the concept of resources to our shader representation, TGSI. We needed a way of arbitrarily binding resources to sampler and defining load/sample formats for resources in shaders. The feature comes with a number of new instructions. The most significant in terms of their functionality are the load and gather4 instructions because they represent first GPGPU centric features we've added to Gallium (obviously both very useful in graphics algos as well).

Staying in TGSI land, we have two new register files. I've added immediate constant array and temporary arrays. Up til now we had really no way of declaring a set of temporaries or immediates as an array. We would imitate that functionality by declaring ranges e.g. "DCL TEMP[0..20]", which becomes very nasty when a shader is using multiple indexable arrays, it also makes bounds checking almost impossible.

A while back Keith wrote Graw which is a convenience state tracker that exposes the raw Gallium interface. It's a wonderful framework for testing Gallium. We have added a few tests for all the above mentioned features.

All of those things are more developer features than anything else though. They all need to be implemented in state trackers (e.g. GL) and drivers before they really go public and that's really the next step.

Geometry Processing - A love story

It's still early in the year but I feel like this is the favorite for the "best computer science related blog title of 2010". I'd include 2009 in that as well, but realistically speaking I probably wrote something equally stupid last year and I don't have the kind of time required to read what I write.

Last week I've merged the new geometry processing pipeline and hooked it into our new software driver, llvmpipe. It actually went smoother than I thought it would, i.e. it just worked. I celebrated by visiting ER, a harsh reminder that my lasting fascination with martial arts will be the end of me (it will pay dividends once llvmpipe becomes self-aware though).

The codepaths are part of the Gallium3D Draw module. It's fairly simple once you get to it. At a draw call we generate the optimal vertex pipeline for the currently set state. LLVM makes this stuff a lot easier. First of all we get the human-readable LLVM IR which is a lot easier than assembly to go over if something goes wrong. Running LLVM optimization passes over a fairly significant amount of code is a lot easier than having to hand-optimize assembly code-generation. Part of it is that geometry processing is composed of a few fairly distinct phases (e.g. fetch, shade, clip, assemble, emit) and given that they all can and will change depending on the currently set state makes it difficult to code-generate optimal code by hand. That is unless you have a compiler framework like LLVM. Then you don't care and hope LLVM will bail you out in cases where you end up doing something stupid for the sake of code-simplicity.

A good example of that is our usage of alloca's for all variables. Initially all variables were in registers but I switched the code to use alloca's for a very simple reason: doing flow control in SOA mode when everything was in registers was tough, it meant keeping track of the PHI nodes. Not to mention that we had no good way of doing indirect addressing in that scheme. Using alloca's makes our code a lot simpler. In the end, thanks to LLVM optimization passes (mem2reg in this case), virtually every usage of allocas is eliminated and replaced with direct register access.

Anyway, with the new geometry paths the improvements are quite substantial. For vertex processing dominated tests (like geartrain which went from 35fps to 110fps) the improvements are between 2x to about 6x, for cases which are dominated by fragment processing it's obviously a lot less (e.g. openarena went from about 25fps to about 32fps). All in all llvmpipe is looking real good.

The software renderer

There's a number of great software renderers out there. SwiftShader and DirectX WARP being the two widely known ones. Unfortunately GNU/Linux, and Free Software in general, didn't have a modern software renderer. That's about to change thanks to a project started by José Fonseca. The project is known as the llvmpipe (obviously a development name). José decided that the way forward is writing a driver for Gallium which would code-generate at run-time the rendering paths from the currently set state. LLVM is used to code-generate and optimize the code.

Besides the idea itself, my favorite part of the driver is the software rasterizer. Keith Whitwell, Brian Paul and José implemented a threaded, tiled rasterizer which performs very nicely and scales pretty well with the number of cores. I'm sure one of them will write more about it when they'll have a bit of spare time.

Currently the entire fragment pipeline is code-generated. Over the last two weeks I've been implementing the vertex pipeline, which I'm hoping to merge soon (hence the light smile). Code generating the entire vertex pipeline isn't exactly trivial, but one can divide it into individual pieces and that makes it a bit easier. Start with the vertex shader, then go back and do the fetch and translate, then again move forward and do the emit, then go back and do the viewport transformations and clipping and so on, finally combine all the pieces together.

In between working on the vertex pipeline I've been filling in some missing pieces in the shader compilation. In particular the control-flow. We use the SOA layout which always make control flow a bit tricky. I've just committed support for loops and the only thing left is support for subroutines in shaders so I think we're in a pretty good shape. We can't rock the speedos quite yet, but we're getting there. It's my new measurment for software quality - could it pull off the speedos look? There's few things on this world that can.

Keeping in mind that we haven't even started optimizing it yet, as we're still implementing features, the driver, on my Xeon E5405 runs the anholt.dm_68 OpenArena demo at 25fps (albeit with some artifacts) which is quite frankly pretty impressive, especially if you compare it to the old Mesa3D software renderer that runs the same demo, on the same machine at 3.5 fps.

OpenGL ES

Two facts, one you didn't need to know, other that you should know. I'm the World Champion in being Vegetarian. Did you know that? Of course not, you probably didn't even know it's a competition. But it is. And I won it. My favorite vegetable? Nachos.
Technically they're a fourth of a fifth generation vegetable. But vegetables are like software, you never want to work with them on the first iteration. Like you wouldn't want to eat corn, but mash it, broil/fry it and you got something magical going on in the form of tortilla chips.

The other fact: OpenGL ES state trackers for Gallium just went public. That includes both OpenGL ES 1.x and 2.x. Brian just pushed them into opengl-es branch. Together with OpenVG they should be part of the Mesa3D 7.6 release.

At this point Mesa3D almost becomes the Khronos SDK and hopefully soon we'll add an OpenCL state tracker and start working on bumping the OpenGL code to version 3.1.

OpenVG Release

I've been procrastinating lately. Where I define procrastination as: doing actual work, instead of writing blog entries. "Can you do that? Redefine words because you feel like it?", oh, sure you can. As long as you don't care about anyone understanding what you're saying, then it's perfectly fine. In fact it's good for you, the less people understands you, the more likely it is that they'll classify you as a genius. Life is awesome like that. That's right, you come here for technical stuff and get blessed with some serious soul searching stuff, enjoy.

We have released the OpenVG state tracker for Gallium.

It's a complete implementation of OpenVG 1.0. While my opinion on 2D graphics and long term usefulness of OpenVG changed drastically during the last year I'm very happy we were able to release the code. After the Mesa3D 7.5 we're going to merge it into master and 7.6 will be the first release that includes both OpenGL and OpenVG.


[You're exuberant about that]. I figured I'll start including stage directions for the blog so that you know how you feel about reading this.

I don't have much to write about the implementation itself. If you have a Gallium driver, then you're good to go and have accelerated 2d and 3d. It's great to see more state trackers being released for Gallium and this whole concept of "accelerating multiple APIs" on top of one driver architecture becoming a reality. [You love it and with a smile, wave bye]

Latest changes

I actually went through all my blog entries and removed spam. That means that you won't be able to find anymore links to stuff that can enlarge your penis. I hope this action will not shatter your lives and you'll find consolation in all the spam that you're getting via email anyway. And if not I saved some of the links. You never know, I say.
I also changed the template, I'd slap something ninja related on it, but I don't have anything that fits. Besides nowadays everyone is a graphics ninja. I'm counting hours until the term will be added to the dictionary. So my new nickname will be "The Lost Son of Norway, Duke of Poland and King of England". Aim high is my motto.

As a proud owner of exactly zero babies I got lots of time to think about stuff. Mostly about squirrels, goats and the letter q. So I wanted to talk about some of the things I've been thinking about lately.

Our friend ("our" as in the KDE communities, if you're not a part of it, then obviously not your friend, in fact he told me he doesn't like you at all) Ignacio Castaño has a very nice blog entry about 10 things one might do with tessellation.
The graphics pipeline continues evolving and while reading Ignacio's entry I realized that we haven't been that good about communicating the evolution of Gallium3D.
So here we go.

I've been slowly working towards support for geometry shaders in Gallium3D. Interface wise the changes are quite trivial, but a little bigger issue is that some (quite modern) hardware, while perfectly capable of emitting geometry in the pipeline is not quite capable of actually supporting all of the features of geometry shader extension. The question of how to handle that is an interesting one, because just simple emission of geometry via a shader is a very desirable feature (for example path rendering in OpenVG would profit from that).

I've been doing some small API cleanups lately. Jose made some great changes to the concept of surfaces, which became pure views on textures. As a follow up, over the last few days we have disassociated buffers from them, to make it really explicit. It gives drivers the opportunity to optimize a few things and with some changes Michel is working on avoid some redundant copies.

A lot of work went into winsys. Winsys, which is a little misnomer, was a part of Gallium that did too much. It was supposed to be a resource manager, handle command submission and handle integration with windowing systems and OS'es. We've been slowly chopping parts of it away. Making it a lot smaller and over the weekend managed to hide it completely from the state tracker side.

Keith extracted the Xlib and DRI code from winsys and put it into separate state trackers. Meaning that just like WGL state tracker, the code is actually sharable between all the drivers. That is great news.

Brian has been fixing and implementing so many bugs/features that people should start writing folk songs about him. Just the fact that we now support GL_ARB_framebuffer_object deserves at least a poem (not a big one, but certainly none of that white, non-rhyming stuff, we're talking full fledged rhymes and everything... You can tell that I know a lot about poetry can't you)

One thing that never got a lot of attention is that Thomas (who did get one of them baby thingies lately) released his window systems buffer manager code.

Another thing that didn't get a lot of attention is Alan's xf86-video-modesetting driver. It's a dummy X11 driver that uses DRM for modesetting and Gallium3D for graphics acceleration. Because of that it's hardware independent, meaning that all hardware that has a DRM driver and Gallium3D driver automatically works and is accelerated under X11. Very neat stuff.

Alright, I feel like I'm cutting into your youtube/facebook time and like all "Lost Sons of Norway, Dukes of Poland and Kings of England" I know my place, so that's it.

OpenVG and accelerating 2D

I tend to break a lot of keyboards. Not because I release all the aggression that I hold deep within me on them, but because I drool a lot. It's not my fault, I really do love graphical bling. Since I'm one of the people who flourishes not when he's doing well, but when others are doing just as badly I've thought about getting other people on the "excessive drooling" bandwagon.

I've tried it in the past. First with my "you ain't cool, unless you drool" campaign, which was not as successful as I've seen it be in my head. It made me realize that marketing is unlikely one of my superpowers. That was a real blow especially since it came a day after I've established that there's like a 95% chance that I can't fly and if I can, then my neighbor will be seriously pissed if I keep landing on his car. You'd think they'd build them stronger, but I digress. After that I went with my strengths and had two technical efforts. The first one led to Exa the second to Glucose. Both are acceleration architectures that try to accelerate Xrender - the API which we use for 2D on X. What Xrender is very good at is text. What Xrender is not so good at is everything else.

Furthermore what one really wants to do nowadays is use the results of a 2D rendering in a 3D environment as a texture or simply implement effects on top of the 2D rendering with shaders. Wouldn't it be nice to have a standard and simple API for all of that? You bet your ass it would. In this particular case "you bet your head" would be a more suitable expression, since by a simple act of reading this blog it's clear you already gave up on your ass and stake your future on your head. I endorse that (both the head more important than ass theory and better api idea). Currently, through the magic of DRM TTM and GLX_texture_from_pixmap one could achieve partially that (we'd need GLX_pixmap_from_texture to finish it), but if you've seen Japanese horror movies you know they got nothing on the code one ends up with, when doing that.

I already mentioned in my previous post that we can lay any number of API's on top of Gallium3D. In fact in the last diagram I already put the two graphics API's that interest me on top of it. OpenVG and OpenGL. In my spare time I've started implementing OpenVG on top of Gallium3D. I'm implementing 1.1 which hasn't been officially released yet. While OpenVG 1.0 is essentially useless for our drool-causing desktops because it doesn't even touch the subject of text handling, 1.1 does and that in itself makes it a great low-level 2D vector graphics api.

We already have OpenVG engines for Qt and Cairo which should make the switch fairly painless. "Hey", you say and I swiftly ignore you, because I have a name you know. "Sunshine", you correct yourself and I smile and say "Huh?". "I want my KDE 4 fast and smooth! Gallium3D has this 3D thing in the name and I have hardware that only does 2D, what about me?". Nothing. You need to use other great solutions. "But my hardware can accelerate blits and lines!". Awesome, then this will likely rock your world. As long as you won't try to run any new applications of course. Even embedded GPU's are now programmable and putting the future of our eye-candy on a technology that predates 2 year old embedded GPU's is an exercise in silly which my chiseled pecs refuse to engage in.

OpenVG standard says "It is possible to provide OpenVG on a platform without supporting EGL. In this case, the host operating system must provide some alternative means of creating a context and binding it to a drawing surface and a rendering thread." which is exactly what we want. That's because we already have that layer, it's GLX. GLX will do the context creation for us. This also means that we'll be able to seemingly combine 2D vector graphics and 3D and manipulate the results of vector rendering the same way we would normal 3D.

Finally 2D graphics will be accelerated the same way 3D is and those hours which you've spent playing 3D games thinking "how the hell is it possible that putting a clock on my desktop makes it choppy when this runs at 400fps?" will be just a story you'll get to tell your grand-kids (while they stare at you with the "please god, let me be adopted" look). As a bonus we get two extremely well documented API's (OpenGL and OpenVG) as our foundation and instead of having two drivers to accelerate 2D and 3D we'll have a single driver.

So what happens with Glucose? Alan and José are still working on it a bit and in a short-term it does provide a pretty enticing solution but long term OpenVG/OpenGL combo is the only thing that really makes sense.

With much love,
Drool Coordinator

GPGPU

Would you like to buy a vowel? Pick "j", it's a good one. So what if it's not a vowel. My blog, my rules. Lately I had a major crash on all things "J". Which is why I moved to Japan.

It's part of my "Most expensive places in the world" tour, unlikely coming to a city near you. I lived in New York City, Oslo, London and now Tokyo. I'm going to write a book about all of that entitled "How to see the world while having no money whatsoever". It's really more of a pamphlet. I have one sentence so far "Find good friends" and the rest are just pictures of black (and they capture the very essence of it).

José Fonseca helped me immensely with the move to Japan, which was great. Japan is amazing, even though finding vegetarian food is almost like a puzzle game and trying to read Japanese makes me feel very violated. So if you live in Tokyo your prayers have been answered, I'm here for your pleasure. Depending on your definition of pleasure of course.

Short of that I've been working on this "graphics" thing. You might have heard of it. Apparently it's real popular in some circles. I've been asked about GPGPU a few times and since I'm here to answer all questions (usually in the most sarcastic way possible... don't judge me, bible says not to, I was born this way) I'm going to talk about GPGPU.

To do GPGPU there's ATI's CTM, NVIDIA's Cuda, Brooke and a number of others. One of the issues is that there is no standard API for doing GPGPU across GPU's from different vendors so people end up using e.g. OpenGL. So the question is whether Gallium3D could make such things as scatter reads accessible, without falling back to using vertex shaders or vertex shaders/fragment shaders combination to achieve them.

Core purpose of Gallium3D is to model the way graphics hardware actually works. So if the ability to do scatter reads is available in modern hardware then Gallium3D will have support for it in the API. Now having said that, it looks like scatter reads are usually done in a few steps, meaning that while some of the GPGPU specific api's expose it as one call, internally number of cycles passes as few instructions are actually being executed to satisfy the request. As such this functionality is obviously not the best to expose in a piece of code which models the way hardware works. That functionality one would implement on top of that api.
I do not have docs for the latest GPU's from ATI and AMD so I can't say what it is that they definitely support. If you have that info let me know. As I said the idea being that if we'll see hardware supporting something natively then it will be exposed in Gallium3D.

Also you wouldn't want to use Gallium3D as the GPGPU api. It is too low level for that and exposes vasts parts of the graphics pipeline. What you (or "I" with vast amount of convincing and promises of eternal love) would do is write a "state tracker". State trackers are pieces of code layered on top of Gallium3D which are used to do state handling for the public API of your choice. Any api layered like this will execute directly on the GPU. I'm not 100% certain whether this will cure all sickness and stop world hunger but it should do, what even viagra never could, for all GPGPU fanatics. The way this looks is a little like this:

This also shows an important aspect of Gallium3D - to accelerate any number of graphical API's or to create a GPU based non-graphics API, one doesn't need N number of drivers (with N being the number of API's), as we currently do. Gallium3D driver (that's singular!) is enough to accelerate 2D, 3D, GPGPU and my blog writing skills. What's even better is that of the aforementioned only the last one is wishful thinking.

So one would create some nice dedicated GPGPU api and put it on top of Gallium3D. Also since Gallium3D started using LLVM for shaders, with minimal effort it's perfectly possible to put any language on top of GPU.

And they lived happily ever after... "Who" did is a detail, since it's obvious they lived happily ever after thanks to Gallium3D.

Constant state objects

I know you wither away, like a leaf in the darkness of the chilly, Autumn night, without my posts. I've been depriving you for too long of the sunshine that is me. Writing an interesting post explaining the new way one is doing register allocation or how the code generation has changed to benefit the drivers is a little difficult and I didn't feel like it would interest anyone. Especially that I know that if I write a blog about a little demo app I wrote in half an hour to showcase some technology I get 50 comments but when I blog about the process of creating that new technology I get two comments with one of them being "What?". On top of that I was lacking those new nude photos (it's art you pig!) of myself that I've promised you and which you yearn for so much.

Lately I've been working on the Gallium3D i965 driver. I had to read up some documentation because, as it turned out, being a "graphics ninja" did not give me intrinsic knowledge of all graphics hardware ever built. I know! I was as shocked as you are right now.

It started with the fact that I wanted to experiment with the layout of vectors in shaders for the code generation using LLVM facilities.

To experiment with different layouts I've decided to write i965 driver for Gallium3D and experiment with LLVM code generation for i965 in that driver. Keith Whitwell and I have been hacking on it and it's going pretty well. It's amazing how much code we've removed from the old i965 driver while porting it to Gallium3D. It was a rather nice feeling to see so much of the complexity of the driver disappear.

The great thing about writing a Gallium3D driver is that a lot of the complexity of the high level API goes away, as it's being moved to "state tracker". State tracker is responsible for all API specific state handling and tricky conversions. The driver never sees the state tracker, it implements a very thin interface, which corresponds rather closely to the way modern hardware works.

One of my favorite changes is the new way we handle state changes. It used to be that the driver had to check whether any of its state changed and if it did upload it before drawing anything. It turned out to be a rather serious bottleneck and it made reading our driver a little painful.

In Gallium3D we went away from that. Now we use similar semantics to what Direct3D10 and OpenGL3 (will) use. Which is that states are largely immutable objects. Their usage follows the

• create from a template
• bind the state to make it active for subsequent rendering calls
• delete when not needed anymore

pattern. This way the driver can do all of its conversion on creation (which ideally happens only once) and then on bind calls (which we have multiple off) it can just reference the id of this state to have it used instead of having to do a full conversion from the Mesa state and upload of the converted state.
When I wrote the constant state objects code I ported our simple i915 driver and, even though on i915 we don't have hardware state caching just doing the state conversions in create calls improved the performance in simple examples by about 15fps. For more complicated examples where the state changes are more frequent it will be a lot more. Not even mentioning drivers which will do full state caching in the hardware where this is going to fly like Superman with diarrhea.

Less complexity in the driver and faster code, is what I think love is all about. Granted that my idea of love might be a smidge skewed on account of me being crazy and all but no one can argue with the "simpler/faster" being 'awesome'.

And to really top this graphics talk off, a picture of me naked:

In retrospect not my best day. The lighting was all wrong...

Gallium3D LLVM

I've seen the future. The blurry outlines sketched by such briliant audio-visual feasts as Terminator came to fruition as in the future the world is ruled by self-aware software.
That's the bad news. The good news is that we haven't noticed.
We're too busy due to the fact that we're all playing the visually stunning "The Good Guy Kills the Bad Guys 2" on Playstation 22. It really captured the essence of the first. The theaters are ruled by "Animals - Did they exist?" documentary with some stunning CG of a horse, although I could have sworn that horses had 4, not 3 legs but then again I'm no nature expert.
What everyone was wrong about though is which program became self-aware and exerted its iron-fist like dominance upon the unsuspecting humans and the last few, very suspicious cockroaches. It wasn't a military mistake. It was a 3D framework that evolved.

But lets start from the beginning. First there was Mesa, the Open Source implementation of the OpenGL specification. Then there came Gallium3D, a new architecture for building 3D graphics drivers. Gallium3D modeled what modern graphics hardware was doing. Which meant that the framework was fully programmable and was actually code-generating its own pipeline. Every operation in Gallium3D was a combination of a vertex and a fragment shader. Internally Gallium3D was using a language called TGSI - a graphics dedicated intermediate representation.

Gallium3D was generating vertex and fragment shaders at run-time to describe what it was about to do. After that system was working, some engineers decided that it would make sense to teach Gallium3D to self-optimize the vertex/fragment programs that it, itself, was creating. LLVM was used for that purpose. It was used because it was an incredible compiler framework with a wonderful community. The decision proved to be the right one as Gallium3D with LLVM proved to be a match made in heaven. It was pure love. I'm not talking about the "roll over onto your stomach, take a deep breath, relax and lets experiment" kind of love, just pure and beautiful love.

So lets take a simple example to see what was happening. Lets deal with triangles, because they're magical.
Now to produce this example Gallium3D was creating two small programs. One that was run for every vertex in the triangle and calculated its position - it was really just multiplying the vertex by the current modelview matrix - that was the vertex shader. The other program was run on every fragment in this figure to produce the resulting pixels - that was the fragment shader. To execute these two programs they were being compiled into LLVM IR, LLVM optimization passes were run on them and LLVM code generators were used to produce executable code. People working on Gallium3D quickly noticed that, even though, their code wasn't optimized at all and it was doing terribly expensive conversions all the time, it was up to 10x faster with LLVM on some demos. They knew it was good.

So Gallium3D was in essence, at run-time, creating and optimizing itself. Which lead many Free Software enthusiast to create, wear and rarely even wash shirts with a slogan "We might not have a billion dollar budget but our graphics framework is smarter than all the people in your company together".

Then in the year 2113 Gallium3D got bored with just creating graphics and took control of the entire world. Which realistically speaking wasn't hard to do because we were willingly immersing ourselves in the worlds it was creating for us anyway.

But that's still many, many years away from our boring present. So for now, while you wait for sex robots, dinners in a tube and world without insects (or for that matter absolutely any animals at all) you can just go, get and play with Gallium3D where LLVM is used. At the moment only in the software cases, but the fifth of November is going to mark the first day in which work on code-generating directly for GPU's using LLVM is going to start.

Remember, remember the fifth of November... (oh, come on that's one heck of an ending)

Gallium3D, Shaders and LLVM

Today we're going to talk about shaders. Well, I'll talk, or to be more specific write, or to be blunt I'll pretend like I'm actually capable of putting my thoughts into readable excerpts that other human beings (hopefully you) and some of my imaginary friends (they're not all winners) can understand.

The question I've been asked a few times during the last week was "who are you and what are you doing in the bushes outside my house", which isn't related to computer graphics at all and what I do in my spare time is none of your business so I won't be talking about that. Now the other question that I've heard a few times during the last week was "will Gallium3D use LLVM?", the short answer is "yes, it will".

First of all a little about graphics hardware. A common thing to do in modern graphics hardware is to have very wide registers and allow stuffing arbitrary vectors inside those registers. For example one register might very well store 8 2 component vectors. Or 16 components of 16 different vectors with other components being stored in subsequent registers. To support writing to those wide registers, usually there's another register, often a stack of them, which is used as a write mask for all operations. Cool, eh? So now when your language supports, god forbid, branches or loops and you want to code generate something for graphics hardware, you're left with two options. Option one is to give up and go ride donkeys in a circus and option two which is to do something crazy to make it work. To be honest I've never even seen a real life donkey. I've seen a cow but we just didn't hit it off. So I knew that option one is just not right for me.

So one of the big worries that we had was whether we'll be able to code generate from LLVM for graphics hardware. After some discussions about pattern matching in code generators and opcode lowering it finally looks like the answer is "yes, we will be able to generate something usable". So the way it will work in Gallium3D is largely similar to the I wanted to do it in the LLVM GLSL code that Roberto and I have been working on for Mesa a few months back. The difference is that the IR in Gallium3D is completely language agnostic.

You can run OpenGL examples already, granted that some of them will not produce correct results,but if it all would just work then I'd have nothing to blog about. I'll start integrating LLVM parts within the next two weeks which is when the performance should get a major boost and flowers should bloom everywhere. You might think that the latter is not, technically, related to our work on Gallium3D and the fact that Autumn is here makes that last statement even more dubious, but you're wrong. Who would you rather trust, you or me? I bet you thought "me" and so I rest my case.


And all of that is brought to you without any sheep sacrifice and hardly any virgin sacrifice ("hardly any" because I, as a representative virgin, am making a small sacrifice, but from what I understand it doesn't count as a full fledged "virgin sacrifice").
How do you like them apples? (or oranges... or strawberries... I like raspberries... They're all good is I guess my point).

Gallium3D

Critics are raving: "Gallium 3D is the best thing that ever happened to Free Software graphics", "It's breathtaking!", "Never before has nudity been so tasteful!"... Alright, maybe not the last one. Actually none of them, since it's a brand new project. In fact that's the point of this entry. To introduce you two.

You, a brilliant (as derived from the fact that you're reading this blog) Free Software enthusiast or simply my very own stalker (both options very satisfying to me personally). And Gallium3D, the foundation of Free Software graphics for years to come.

Gallium3D is a redesign of Mesa's device driver model. It's a new approach to the problem of accelerating graphics. Given tremendous investment that free desktops make in OpenGL nowadays I'm very excited to be working on it.

At Tungsten Graphics we've decided that we need a device driver model that would:

• make drivers smaller and simpler
• model modern graphics hardware
• support multiple graphics API's

The basic model, as presented by Keith Whitwell on XDS2007, looks as follows:


You can follow the development of Gallium as it happens in Mesas gallium-0.1 branch.

Also you can read a detailed explanation of what it is on our wiki .

Now why should you be excited (besides the fact that, like I already pointed out, there's no developer nudity in it and that being excited about the stuff I'm excited about is in general a good idea).

• Faster graphics
• Better and more stable drivers
• OpenGL 3
• Ability to properly accelerate other graphics APIs through the same framework. Did someone say OpenVG?

This is a huge step on our road to tame the "accelerated graphics" demon in Free Software. We've been talking about it for a long time and now and we're finally doing it. There's something zen like about working on free software graphics for years and finally seeing all the pieces falling into place.

Mesa and LLVM

I've been toying for a while with the idea of rewriting programmable pipeline in Mesa. The most obvious reason is the fact that fragment shaders are absolutely crucial when it comes to modern graphics. We use them extensively in Qt and I'm using it all over the place in my special effects library. As those small (mostly GLSL based) programs become more and more complicated a need for an extensive compiler framework with especially good optimization support becomes apparent. We already have such a framework in LLVM.

I managed to convince the person I consider an absolutely genius when it comes to compiler technology, Roberto Raggi to donate some of his time and together with me rewrite the programmable pipeline in Mesa. The day after I told Roberto that we need to lay Mesa on top of LLVM I got an email from him with GLSL parser he wrote (and holly crap, it's so good...). After picking up what was left of my chin from the floor I removed the current GLSL implementation from Mesa, integrated the code Roberto sent me, did some ninja magic (which is part of my job description) and pushed the newly created git repository to freedesktop.org.

So between layers of pure and utter black magic (of course not "voodoo", voodoo and graphics just don't mix) what does this mean, you ask (at least for the purpose of this post). As I pointed out in the email to the Mesa list last week:

• it means that Mesa gets an insanely comprehensive shading framework
  
• it means that we get insane optimization passes for free (strong emphasis on "insane". They're so cool I drool about being able to execute shading languages with this framework and I drool very rarely nowadays... And largely in a fairly controllable fashion.)
• it means we get well documented and understood IR,
• it means we get maintenance of parts of the code for free, (the parts especially difficult for graphics people)
• it means that there's less code in Mesa,
• it means that we can basically for free add execution of C/C++, soon Python, Java and likely other languages, code on GPU's because frontend's for those are already available/"in work" for LLVM. (and even though I'm not a big fan of Python the idea of executing it on GPU is giving me goose-bumps the way only some of Japanese horror movies can)

I think it has all the potential to be by far the best shading framework in any of the OpenGL implementations out there. Now having said that there's a lot of tricky parts that we haven't even begin solving. Most of them are due to the fact that a lot of modern graphics hardware is, well, to put it literary "freaking wacky" (it's a technical term). We'll need to add pretty extensive lowering pass and most likely some kind of transformation pass that does something sensible with branch instructions for hardware that doesn't have support for them. We'll cross that bridge once we get to it. Plus we'll need to port drivers... But for now we'll bask in the sheer greatness of this project.

Ah, the git repository is at http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=users/zack/mesa.git;a=shortlog;h=llvm , Roberto and I have tons of unpushed changes though . Of course this is an ongoing research project that both Roberto and I work on in our very limited spare time (in fact Roberto seems to now have almost what you'd call a "life". Apparently those take time. Personally I still enjoy sleepless nights and diet by starvation patched by highly suspicious activities in between. Which by the way does wonders to my figure and if this is not going to work I'll try my luck as a male super-model) so we can only hope that it will all end up as smoothly as we think it should. And in KDE 4 most graphics code will be able to utilize eye-popping effects with virtually no CPU price.