open-source graphics device drivers, which have been, or are being written based on information gained through clean-room reverse engineering, adopted the driver model provided by Gallium3D, e.g. nouveau and others (see Free and open-source graphics device driver for a complete list). The main reason may be that the Gallium3D driver model lessens the amount of code required to be written. Of course, being licensed under a free software license, this code can at any time by anybody be rewritten to implement the DRI-, or some other, driver model. History Original authors of Gallium3D were Keith Whitwell and Brian Paul at Tungsten Graphics (acquired by VMware in 2008). Milestones As of fall 2011, there were at least 10 known, mature and working Gallium3D drivers. Open-source drivers for Nvidia graphics cards by the name of Nouveau team develops its drivers using the Gallium3D framework. 2008-07-13: Nouveau development is done exclusively for the Gallium framework. The old DRI driver was removed from the master branch of the Mesa repository on Freedesktop.org. 2009-02-11: The gallium-0.2 branch was merged into mainline Master branch of Mesa. Development is done in Mesa mainline. 2009-02-25: Gallium3D can run on Linux as well as FreeBSD kernels. 2009-05-01: Zack Rusin from Tungsten Graphics added the OpenVG state tracker to Mesa 3D, which enables Scalable Vector Graphics to be hardware-accelerated by any Gallium3D-based driver. 2009-07-17: Mesa3D 7.5 is released, the first version to include Gallium3D. 2010-09-10: Initial support for the Evergreen GPUs was added to the r600g driver. 2010-09-21: There are two Gallium3D drivers for ATI hardware known as r300g and r600g for R300-R500 and R600-Evergreen GPUs respectively. 2010-09-21: Major commits were made to the code to support Direct3D 10 and 11. In time, this might offer the ability to use recent Direct3D implementations on Linux systems. 2011-11-30: Intel 965g and Cell Gallium drivers were removed from the master branch of Mesa as unmaintained and broken. 2013-11-30: Mesa 10 with OpenGL 3.2, 3.3 and OpenCL 1.0+ 2014-11-18: Major commits were made to the code to support Direct3D 9. 2015-09-15: Mesa 11 with OpenGL 4.0, 4.1 and OpenCL 1.2 (incomplete) 2015-12-15: Mesa 11.1 Driver VIRGL for virtual machines with OpenGL 3.3 2016-07-08: Mesa 12 with OpenGL 4.2, 4.3 and Vulkan 1.0 (Intel ANV and AMD RADV) 2016-11-01: Mesa 13 with OpenGL 4.4 and OpenGL ES 3.2 2017-02-13: Mesa 17.0 with OpenGL 4.5 and freedreno driver with OpenGL 3.0 and 3.1 2017-05-10: Mesa