Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish adds support for Gallium Nine

During the development period of this new version of Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish, In this blog we have highlighted several of the new features that the Canonical team has decided to implement in their next release.

Now the new news that has been released in recent times is that the new version of Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish should arrive next week, more precisely on October 18.

Even in the freeze stage, there seemed to be no exception to include some news. Although last minute Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish will add Gallium nin supportand. Also, it will come with the new version of Mesa 18.2.2, which is about to be released.

So that this could be included within this release, Canonical developers decided to give a feature freeze exception to allow Mesa 18.2.x will be included within Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish, with Mesa 18.2.2 specifically (ie the latest update) now ready.

About Gallium

We must remember that Gallium is a new architecture for building graphics controllers.

Initially compatible with Mesa and Linux graphics drivers, Gallium is designed to allow portability to all major operating systems and graphics interfaces.

Additional slides, videos and examples are available online to learn the internals of the Gallium architecture available.

Compared to existing Linux graphics drivers, Gallium:

• Make the conductors smaller and simpler.
• Current DRI drivers are quite complicated. They are large, contain duplicate code, and have the burden of implementing many concepts closely related to the OpenGL 1.x / 2.x API.
• Modern graphic hardware model.
• The new driver architecture is an abstraction of modern graphics hardware, rather than an OpenGL-> hardware translator. The new controller interface will assume the presence of programmable vertex / fragment shaders and floppy memory objects.
• Supports multiple graphics APIs.
• The shortened OpenGL 3.1+ APIs will be much smaller than OpenGL 1.x / 2.x. We would like a controller model that is API neutral so that it is not tied to a specific graphics API.
• Supports multiple operating systems.
• Gallium drivers do not have operating system specific code (operating system specific code is entered in the "winsys / screen" modules) so they are portable to Linux, Windows and other operating systems.

Gallium nine comes to Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefis

gallium nine is an open source implementation of DirectX 9. The patch allows Linux users to "enjoy games designed for Windows DX9 in full resolution."

By not converting native D3D9 calls to OpenGL (as Wine does), and instead sending them directly to your graphics card.

Without a doubt Table 18.2 deserved this feature freeze exception worth granting, it has a real pack of improvements, ranging from the new Vega GPU support, OpenGL 4.4 support, and better settings for AMD APUs.

The motion means that this new Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish release will come with the Mesa graphics drivers more stable available right out of the box, thus ensuring Ubuntu is in top shape right from the start of its release!

It's really hard to beat the performance that Gallium Nine offers, which makes it a bit strange that support for Gallium Nine isn't included by default in Wine. Wine developers even rejected it.

For Gallium Nine to be supported, it must be run with Mesa's open source drivers in order to take advantage of Gallium Nine.

Support for this open source DirectX is included in most versions of Mesa, so currently in Ubuntu if you want to get this support you must compile personally on the system.

This also means that you must be running the open source AMDGPU or Nouveau drivers.

If you are using an NVIDIA card, it is probably best that you continue to run the proprietary drivers and use Wine Staging instead.

The performance increase you will see in Gallium Nine will be outweighed by the decrease in Nouveau performance.