Interview: Eric Anholt, Open Source Graphics Engineer

By Dawn M. Foster (91 posts) on January 5, 2010 at 8:00 am

photo_eric_anholtEric Anholt is an engineer in Intel's Open Source Technology Center. He works mostly on graphics projects like Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) and Mesa.

Dawn: What do you like about working in Intel's Open Source Technology Center?

Eric: We've got a really strong commitment to open source in our group. I've never felt like I had to compromise myself to work here. Every day we get to push Linux forward to places it hasn't gone before, and everyone gets to enjoy the results.

Dawn: Why are projects like the Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) and Mesa important for Intel and Linux in general?

Eric: When we started the graphics group, Linux graphics was way behind other OSes. No framebuffer objects, no GLSL, and our memory allocation was always too much for some people and not enough for others. With the work we've done on GEM and KMS, Moblin and other OSVs are building a modern desktop that wasn't possible before. Some of the most rewarding times are when other people take our projects and build things we would never have done with them -- the Wayland alternative window server for example, or the EGL stack that doesn't rely on X. That just wouldn't have been tractable without the low-level work on the graphics stack we've been doing.

Dawn: Would you tell us a little more about your recent work on GEM and Mesa?

Eric: Sure. We'd been struggling with getting TTM (Translation Table Maps) to work on our driver for some time, and bumping against the limitations in it -- hard limits on how much memory graphics could make use of, and of multiple clients facing the possibility of deadlock. We decided that it would be easier to just build a memory manager from scratch for just our chipset instead of building on an abstraction of a different graphics chip. It turned out that we were right, and a year later we've got a stable dynamic memory manager for our chipset in about the same amount of code we were trying to write for the poor matchup to the previous memory manager.

Since getting GEM into place and getting all of the graphics stack (Mesa, X, the kernel console) on it, we've been able to go push our GL stack forward. It wasn't a surprise to us to find that there were now many extensions that were easy, such as GL_ARB_occlusion_query. Others were harder, like getting EXT_framebuffer_object working for everyone. As we've got our featureset closer to being caught up with the current GL state of the art, I've also been able to get more time for tiny optimizations in Mesa, tuning the shaders we send to the hardware and cutting down the CPU usage of our GL stack.

Dawn: In September, you took a 7 day bike trip across Oregon and Washington. What was the high point of the trip?

Eric: Getting in a rhythm and pushing myself past where I thought my limits were. We did longer rides than I'd ever done before, for days in a row. The best was the third 6-mile grind up a steep grade late on day 3, when we were so worn out that we were all setting personal goals of making it just one more mile before stopping for a break again. The beer at the end of that ride never tasted so good.

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