[libre-riscv-dev] https://libre-riscv.org/resources/ page

[Jacob Lifshay]

On Sun, Sep 15, 2019, 13:46 Michael Pham <pham.michael.98 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Sorry if I'm missing something, but isn't SwiftShader also a graphics
> driver? At least, that's what the second page says of the PDF that
> Luke linked. Although it says on that second page that it is a
> graphics driver for CPUs,


graphics driver for CPUs means software rendered since those CPUs (x86 and
ARM) don't have any instructions specifically intended for graphics
operations (like texture lookups or triangle rasterization HW). This is
similar to how llvmpipe works in Mesa3d.

but Libre RISC-V is a combined CPU/GPU,
> which is why I thought it was similar to Kazan but more general
> purpose.
>

it's more general in that it also has graphics API translators (OpenGL ES
to Vulkan and similar).

It's less performant in that it probably won't support the custom graphics
instructions on the libre-riscv gpu.


> By the way, I found this Phoronix article that mentions Kazan as a
> similar effort to SwiftShader (in the last paragraph).
>

that's because Kazan used to be just intended for software rendering
(before I joined the libre-riscv project).

Jacob