GLAMOR Will Likely End Up In The X.Org Server
Two years ago when the GLAMOR project was in its infancy -- an effort to do 2D/X.Org acceleration via OpenGL -- it was designed to be inside the X.Org Server. Back then it was an Intel pet project for another method of faster 2D.
GLAMOR wasn't merged into the X.Org Server in 2011 but spun out into its own library that in turn can be loaded by any X.Org DDX driver able to leverage the GLAMOR acceleration code-paths. Intel worked on it for a while but then support came to the Radeon driver.
The main benefactor of GLAMOR up to this point really has been the open-source AMD Radeon driver where it's depended upon for 2D acceleration on Radeon HD 7000 series graphics processors and newer as they're no longer implementing legacy EXA code-paths by hand for this driver. Older Radeon GPUs can optionally use Glamor as can the Intel driver still do so, but Intel users already have the superior and finely-tuned SNA acceleration back-end.
While GLAMOR has been happily living as its own standalone library, there's now a call to pull it into the X.Org Server as was originally intended. Eric Anholt of Intel wrote in a mailing list post where he requests GLAMOR be pulled into the X.Org Server. "I'm picking the glamor work back up, trying to bring it in tree so it's useful beyond just the Xorg DDX...Here's a pull request for the glamor series I originally wrote, plus the code Zhigang Gong wrote inside the X Server tree that I was able to find, plus a rebase of the external glamor tree onto that so that it's all inside of the X Server with the most complete history I could come up with."
Besides merging the code, he also has some patches in the work for making Xephyr work with GLAMOR and support for building as a usable Xorg module. So far he has it tested with the mode-setting driver with partial DRI2/DRI3 support. Eric has also been working through some "significant improvements" to the pipeline for the GLAMOR to driver API.
In the end Eric's goal comes down to "accelerated rendering for your X Server to be trivial to set up, because it *should* be."
4 Comments
