Will The Linux 2.6.39 Kernel Bring Graphics Magic?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Will The Linux 2.6.39 Kernel Bring Graphics Magic?

While the Linux 2.6.38 kernel isn't even released yet, it's likely to be released in the next day or two. After that and a few days of downtime, the merge window for the Linux 2.6.39 kernel will be opened. What features can one expect for the open-source Linux graphics support? As is usual these days, there's lots of expected changes...

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

[Flyser]

anything fancy for intel users?
I see unrecoverable GPU lockups since 2.6.38-rc*

[Smorg]

pff, there's never "magic" revolutionary changes in graphics. Go away for a year, come back, millions of lines of code change, and you'll notice maybe 1 or 2 things that kinda work which didn't before. It's always slow and steady.

[FireBurn]

pff, there's never "magic" revolutionary changes in graphics. Go away for a year, come back, millions of lines of code change, and you'll notice maybe 1 or 2 things that kinda work which didn't before. It's always slow and steady.

You mean apart from whole families of devices being added?

And of course you won't be including page-flipping which drastically speeded things up too

[d2kx]

Well, .39 will introduce support for a lot of new network (LAN/WLAN) chips, like the Realtek RTL8105E and Ralink RT5390 (along with very important fixes for Ralink RT3090). Quite a lot of the new AMD Fusion subnotebooks use those. So there's important stuff happening outside the graphics department.

[bongmaster2]

lol im the reader who told michael about it.
its definetly true.ive tested so many kernel and mesa version in teh last 6 months.
im using swapbufferswait pageflipping and colortiling since a few months ago starting with 2.6.37 drm-next.

as soon as i switch back to 2.6.38 rc7 the performance drops extremely like with 2.6.37 /36 /35

[bongmaster2]

hhm strange now stock 2.6.38 scores 75% of fglrx too.
i hope that its not just caused by a repaired drm modul....

well anyway i wanna see michael test with all optimisations to get a real impression of what is possible today and not what distros are already using

sorry if im wrong

[Adarion]

I hope for

- even better R600 support (and the others, too)
- especially power savings (there is, it works but still did not reach the consumption values I had with fglrx or catalyst (on W32 then).
- and introduction of missing feeatures
- aaand: something good for the VIA chipsets
- aaand: something good for the ImgTec PowerVR chips

Okay, it's not christmas but ... maybe ...

But a nice and flawless 2.6.38 with responsiveness patches would be a nice birthday gift for me.

[ChrisXY]

ive tested so many kernel and mesa version in teh last 6 months.
im using swapbufferswait pageflipping and colortiling since a few months ago starting with 2.6.37 drm-next.

Do you happen to know if the drm-radeon-testing branch is as good as drm-next?
Because in Archlinux there is a good repository with mesa, xf86-video-ati and the kernel26-drm-radeon-testing updated to most recent git version every few days and I'd like to know if it is worth compiling another branch..

[V!NCENT]

There is so much tech jargon in this that the avarage Slashdot guru would have killed himself after reader only a quarter of all the Wikpedia entries about it.

Anyway what I noticed most was that if you zoom out for a little and notice a bigger picture you are actually baffeled by what people do in a very short time. Sick.

It is always the same with Linux; if you sort the advances on a year-after-year basis you can help but wonder how many awesomeness still need to be performed to actually gain some respectable desktop marketshare