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Help Improve OpenGL Support In Mesa Drivers

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Timothy Arceri is at it again, his second crowdfunding campaign to get working on the mesa drivers.
QuoteFollowing on from my last campaign: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/help-improve-opengl-support-for-the-linux-graphics-drivers

Many of my previous backers have asked that I do a follow up campaign to help improve OpenGL on Linux so here it is. Previous backers may remember that I did some investigation into the GL_ARB_arrays_of_arrays extension during my last project: https://github.com/tarceri/mesa-debug/wiki/Day-8 (Please note that the extension turned out to be more work than I thought when I wrote that blog post)

Well I have been doing some work on the extension in my spare time and I have got to a point where running another campaign would result in some real benefit.


Glad to see it's already smashed his target, he wanted $1,500 and is currently sitting high at $2,169, if we get him to $3,000 he can work for longer!

I know a lot of you use the open source drivers so I am sure you will want to support his efforts. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Crowdfunding
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About the author -
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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7 comments

Hamish Nov 17, 2013
This is interesting. :)
Anonymous Nov 17, 2013
Sigh, again going to give some cash to this fellow :). I'd really like that. Even though, I'm currently not using the open source drivers, I want mesa to improve.
HadBabits Nov 17, 2013
I guess I missed this the first time, luckily pay day was yesterday :D
Lord Avallon Nov 18, 2013
I like this!
FutureSuture Nov 18, 2013
I am still too much of a Linux n00b. So Mesa is the open source implementation of OpenGL which itself is not actually open source. The more Mesa is improved, the better games will run on Nouveau and AMD's various open source drivers. I know that Intel has a lot of developers working on its open source driver for Linux and I assume they work on Mesa as well, but apparently that ain't enough. Arceri created a debugger with his last campaign as far as I recall and is now doing a new campaign to do another Mesa related project to tackle a problem he encountered in his last campaign. Am I getting this right?
Hamish Nov 18, 2013
Pretty much FutureSuture. Both AMD and especially Intel put a lot of effort into maintaining the free Linux graphics stack, as do some other Linux vendors such as Red Hat and a wide range of community developers, but this still pails in comparison when stacked against the resources made available by AMD and Nvidia when it comes to their own proprietary implementations of of OpenGL and their own graphics drivers. This is why looking into crowdfunding to help give these hard working developers an edge does definitely seem to be very much a good idea.
scaine Nov 18, 2013
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A slight clarification too - OpenGL does have "source", so it's not that OpenGL is not open source. It's how you go about living up the OpenGL specification that's important. The proprietary implementations are quite advanced, so they get to say "Supports OpenGL 4.3" or whatever. However the open source implementation, Mesa, is lagging a little bit behind.

Well, a lot behind, really!
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