Progress

I put some work into getting field-based prediction working, and I think I have it mostly right. I ran into what I think is a bug in SoftPipe, which has to do with locking and updating textures. For some reason the surface and texture cache does not get invalidated in such cases, leading to stale texels being read and displayed. I manually flush the texture cache after mapping textures, and that seems to take care of it. It took a lot of debugging to track that one down and is probably fixed upstream, but at least it's another issue out of the way. At the moment some macroblocks are still not rendered correctly, but I'm hoping to get those out of the way.

The one thing I really can't stand is writing shader code for Gallium. The amount of C code you need write to generate a token stream for even a simple shader is obscene. Currently I have 12 shaders and each is about 200-300 lines of code for 10-15 shader instructions, so most of that code is noise. On more than one occasion I've made changes to the wrong shader just because it's so hard to wade through the code. What I wouldn't do for a simple TGSI assembler right about now. I'll have to do something about that, it's a huge eye sore.

It's not surprising that I'm a little behind on my schedule. I started on IDCT a while back but put that code down to focus on MC. Luckily IDCT isn't strictly necessary as XvMC allows for MC-only acceleration, so I can test things and move forward on MC without having to worry about IDCT. I'm hoping the next step of the project, getting things running on real hardware, will be as painless as possible allowing me to get IDCT working. However, considering all the little unforseen issues that have cropped up with SoftPipe I wouldn't be surprised if I ran into more of the same with the Nouveau driver.