Intel X.Org Driver Enables Render-Nodes By Default For DRI3

While we're still waiting on xf86-video-intel 3.0 to finally be released after the better part of two years in development, Chris Wilson continues piling on new functionality for the Intel X.Org driver.

There's nothing new to report on an xf86-video-intel 3.0 release but that there's new features continuing to pour in. The latest change today to talk about for the Intel DDX is enabling render nodes by default when building with DRI3 support. Previous a compile-time switch was needed to build in the render-nodes support.

Another change today by Chris Wilson explicitly disables render-nodes for DRI2. Chris wrote, "The executive decision has been made to render DRI2 inoperable with render-nodes, so keep on passing the master device path to clients."

DRM render nodes is about exposing multiple GPUs for GPGPU/OpenCL compute and GPU off-screen rendering without anything from the display side. DRM render-nodes works in the direction of separating the GPU and display logic within the kernel code. Render-nodes have been worked on for a while within kernel-space and now the Intel X.Org driver is finally set to enable its user-space side of it with the xf86-video-intel 3.0 when using DRI3.

Aside from today's Intel DDX changes, Chris recently landed a dri3info utility into the driver code-base, made various other DRI3 improvements, and beyond that a majority of his focus is still on tuning his SNA acceleration architecture that's the default to xf86-video-intel v3.0 -- while others at Intel remain focused on GLAMOR development. Let's hope xf86-video-intel 3.0 will finally ship before Wayland rules the world.