Author Topic: support opengl  (Read 6419 times)

Joop

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support opengl
« on: July 05, 2015, 04:35:31 pm »
I did test a Java CAD program for Legobricks. But it won't start due to not know our OS. I wrote to the developer and he answered that it's build on Java-to-OpenGL library called JOGL http://jogamp.org/ that includes some native code as a bridge to native OpenGL calls.
Now the question, does OS/2-eCS support OpenGL?

Regards

Dave Yeo

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Re: support opengl
« Reply #1 on: July 05, 2015, 05:59:36 pm »
Warp 4 supported opengl in software and hasn't really been worked on since. The software support is very slow compared to hardware support. You can start here, http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/h-search.php?button=Search&key=opengl&dir=%2F.

Roderick Klein

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Re: support opengl
« Reply #2 on: July 05, 2015, 07:08:22 pm »
David his right, OpenGL software implementation of IBM is very slow.

Besides OS/2 having a very old version of Open GL that is software based from IBM and extremely slow.
SNAP also has MesaGL (of the top of my head thats what its called).  If you do have SNAP running on your system you can see that in the SNAP setup utility. It also shows the frame rate of some of the MesaGL animations it can display.
WHen you run that you understand with the frames per second how much OpenGL demands of your system.

I have read Arca Noae purchased a license for Scitech SNAP. But I doubt they will implement hardware OpenGL in SNAP.
Unless the situation has changest of the years. When I still worked at Mensys I did talk (about 10 years) to an engineer about OS/2 OpenGL hardware support. At the time two issue's where around.

1. Implemening hardware 3D support is a lot of work, compared to 2D support.

2. An even bigger issue is still that some vendors do not provide specifications for all chipsets. On Linux I have seen it recently where in some cases its better to run the binaries of the device manufactor. So getting specs for OS/2 would be difficult.

The last hurdle that then comes up (possibly) is that I do not know what our Java implementatation has for OpenGL support.
Should the Java API calls not communicate with a call to video subsystem (if we would have hardware OpenGL support).
I would be surprised if does OpenGL calls in Java would currently even be mapped to softwareGL.

Anyway a lot of details that would need to work to get Java OpenGL to work.

Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE

Dave Yeo

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Re: support opengl
« Reply #3 on: July 05, 2015, 08:15:54 pm »
...
The last hurdle that then comes up (possibly) is that I do not know what our Java implementatation has for OpenGL support.
Should the Java API calls not communicate with a call to video subsystem (if we would have hardware OpenGL support).
I would be surprised if does OpenGL calls in Java would currently even be mapped to softwareGL.

Anyway a lot of details that would need to work to get Java OpenGL to work.

Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE

Probably the OpenJDK API maps to MesaGL which in turn maps to hardware drivers or software emulation. Of course we would still need an up to date MesaGL port as our last port is a dozen or so years old and what it would take to update the driver,  I don't know. Looking quickly at the MesaGL git repo, I found this, http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/log/?qt=grep&q=os%2F2 and can't fnd any evidence of our support being removed, though the whole directory structure has changed and GLUT itself seems to have gone away or become something else.
One way that various Linux desktops implement software OpenGL is using CLANG to implement a JIT (Just in time compiler) which may have acceptable performance on modern hardware.
As usual, lots of work for a knowledgeable good programmer and probably never going to happen.

Joop

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Re: support opengl
« Reply #4 on: July 05, 2015, 08:22:02 pm »
Thanks for the answers. Sounds as a no go for just one program.
Joop