The drm git would be also usefull when it would only work with the current kernel, because it is not really a good idea to compile the whole kernel over and over again after a small change when only drm would be needed.
I think we'll see distro schedules and kernel schedules gradually align themselves so that non-enterprise distros will automatically pick up the most recent kernel release while it's still fresh. Right now kernel packagers need to plan around both X and kernel release schedules in order to pick up new hardware, but as hardware-specific code moves out of the X drivers and into either the kernel or Gallium3D this should become a lot easier for everyone to manage.
I'm not sure if the Gallium3D code is built as a separate library or is linked into the state tracker, but there's a good argument for having it independent of the state trackers so that only the Gallium3D library needs to be updated. This is all "next year" stuff of course; there aren't enough drivers using Gallium3D yet for this to be a practical solution for distros today.
Last edited by bridgman; 09-20-2009 at 12:42 PM.
The drm git would be also usefull when it would only work with the current kernel, because it is not really a good idea to compile the whole kernel over and over again after a small change when only drm would be needed.
Well ok, but why do i need to checkout the whole kernel tree when i only need drm?
It had security issues, but these were fixed some time ago:
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIMach64
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...er/019137.html
Sure, but the checkout was MUCH smaller.
AFAIK, the Mach64 X driver doesn't actually need DRM to provide acceleration. I suppose that's the reason the DRM driver isn't getting merged.