Gallium3D

Gallium3D is a three-dimensional graphics library for device drivers, developed by Tungsten Graphics, which develops graphics technologies in the Open Source environment. Currently, the company is developing VMware , which bought out Tungsten Graphics. Since 2009, it has been part of the Mesa project.

Linux graphics stack illustration

The structure (model) of Mesa / DRI and Gallium3D drivers is different. But many of the same free and open code are shared .

A possible example of a matrix when the Gallium3D driver model is implemented. Thanks to the introduction of the Gallium 3D Tracker and Gallium3D WinSys interfaces, only 18 modules are required instead of 36. Each WinSys module can work with each Gallium3D device driver module and with each State Tracker module.

The Gallium3D API is a layer between the implementation of a high-level graphic interface like OpenGL and a driver for a video card . Its task is to simplify the development of video card drivers by linking duplicate code in several different drivers into one view. This is necessary to provide better work sharing (for example, leaving memory management to the core DRI driver) and maintaining a modern hardware architecture.

Gallium3D is a joint API that provides standard hardware functions implemented on modern graphics hardware, such as, for example, modules of the shader program. Thus, three-dimensional APIs created according to OpenGL 1.x / 2.x / 3.x, OpenVG , Direct3D specifications (its implementation in the Wine compatibility environment) will only need a front-end , called the State Tracker and provided by Mesa . This is the difference between modern Mesa 3D and earlier versions without Gallium3D, which required the full implementation of OpenGL (including the front-end) for each hardware platform. In addition, thanks to the modular structure of Gallium3D, work is already underway on closer integration with the LLVM compiler program suite and the creation of a module that allows optimizing the shader code on the fly.

With the use of Gallium3D, the DRM driver will manage the video card's memory, and the DRI driver (now called DRI2) will be more focused on tracking the GPU . This will solve the problem of memory management, which was previously considered impractical when using Mesa 3D.