Intel 2.6 RC1 X.Org Driver Brings DRI2, XvMC

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel 2.6 RC1 X.Org Driver Brings DRI2, XvMC

Intel's Zhenyu Wang is managing the release cycle for the xf86-video-intel 2.6 graphics driver and this evening he has announced the availability of its first release candidate. The Intel 2.6 X.Org driver brings DRI2 support, XvMC for the Intel GMA 4500 series, kernel mode-setting, RandR 1.3, UXA acceleration fixes, and HDMI audio support. In total there are more than 100 changes in xf86-video-intel 2.6 RC1 over the xf86-video-intel 2.5 series...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NjkzMg

[KDesk]

Great!

Will XvMC be supported for older chips?

To use DRI2 what do we need? This new Kernel 2.6.28, this intel driver 2.6, xserver 1.6 and what else? Any modification of Mesa3D? Any new dri or drm lib?

[loeppel]

Sorry for not saying that. drm master should be fine. libdrm would have
new releases shortly.

See: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...er/041556.html

[bugmenot]

Really great, I'm impressed!
Would like to see something similar from the amd/ati side though.

Are there actually and news on VA API? Is it 'dead'? Thanks.

[miles]

Hopefully ATI and Nvidia will also support Xrandr 1.3 before Feb./March and we can all use the same GUI in the distributions released in April/May.

[yesterday]

Intel releases really impress me, but I do wonder whether the quality and competitiveness of the hardware has an impact on their attitude towards drivers. I wonder whether they will keep up the OS drivers with Larrabee, which will ostensibly be more competitive with ATI/NVIDIA .

[miles]

Intel has always had difficulties with drivers, their Windows drivers are often reported to pick up the hw advertised features quite late (it sometimes takes more than 6 month to get the drivers to support the shader level their IGP were advertised to support), so they're not really comparable with Nvidia and ATI drivers.

Larrabee's main feature is x86, so there's no way they'd go closed source in Linux, it would go against all their strategy. CPU vendors are usually far better with open source than graphic card makers, that's why AMD buying ATI was a good thing for open source drivers. At the time they bought ATI I knew we'd see them open their specifications, doing the contrary would have gone against their culture. Plus, they bought ATI for Fusion, and there's no way their technology could go into the CPU and remain closed, it's like shooting themselves in the foot (do they want to shut themselves from good gcc optimisations, considering the huge amount of programs that are compile with gcc?).

[Linuxhippy]

Slow

The 2.6-RC1 driver is dog slow because of all the refactoring going on for GEM. A lot of well-tuned code has been replaced by newly fritten stuff ... os I guess it needs another round of profiling/optimizations until it performs as well as previous releases.