Journal 10, October 31

Article: Important update about Gallium3D

Recently AROS a mostly AmigaOS 3.1 compatible operating system has gained hardware accelerated 3d on Nvidia hardware ranging from the Geforce2 up to the 7000 series this however is unheard of in hobby and amateur operating systems!

While Gallium3d currently has a few bugs on AROS that can be seen by comparing the videos of a demo running in software mode and again with the hardware driver. The hardware driver seems to have trouble with rendering some textured 3d ojects from what I can tell.

Gallium3d is the next generation core of the The Mesa 3D Graphics Library which runs on most operating systems allowing cross platform 3d development whether it be games, 3d cad tools, virtual reality or technical demos. The big advantage with Gallium3d is that it is much more modular than previous versions of Mesa meaning that for Mesa to be ported to a new OS all that is needed is to write the operating system specific componetnts and add support for the hardware dirvers to your operating system. This was possible with older versions of mesa but now with galluim3d the same drivers can accelerate multiple APIs such as OpenCL, OpenVG, Clutter, OpenGL ES and of course OpenGL. Whereas in the past it would have taken much more code to enable all those APIs even with mere software rendering.

While most Galluim3d/Mesa development goes on for the Linux platform another OS besides AROS that is already getting a port is the Haiku operating system. Haiku is a BeOS alike operating system that aims to please desktop and workstation users. It has good compatibility with most older BeOS software and has some tricks of its own now as well I may blog more specifically about it sometime in the future. I have been building test images of the Haiku OS for quite some time since I found out about it last year and the developers are progressing quite quickly even though it is a small project. A screenshot of the gallium3d software renderer on haiku can be found here.

One of the coolest things about AROS is how fast it is for instance it takes mere seconds for it to do a warm boot! AROS also has a webkit based browser which is the same engine in Apples safari browser that supports most websites although Adobe flash only works on Windows, Linux and Solaris or an operating system that emulates those such as FreeBSD.

If you would like to try out AROS you can even run it inside windows as an applicaion with windows as the host! Or you can test out the more complete AROS derived distro called Icaros