DRI2 Support Proposed For The Generic Mode-Setting Driver

Eric Anholt while working at Broadcom on the Raspberry Pi graphics driver has sent out patches that add support for DRI2 with GLAMOR to the xf86-video-modesetting driver.

Eric's patches allow Direct Rendering Infrastructure 2 to be used with GLAMOR while using xf86-video-modesetting, the generic DDX driver now part of the X.Org Server that aims to work with any DRM/KMS device and most recently has been the work to make this driver handle just not mode-setting for the X.Org Server but to provide generic 2D acceleration with GLAMOR. Now with DRI2 support, 3D support too while using this "generic" DDX.

The DRI2 support for the modesetting driver adds over two thousand lines of code to the X.Org Server code-base. As what seems like a bit of a mess and yet another copy of the graphics driver PCI IDs being present in the code-base, all of the Mesa PCI ID to driver name mappings had to be imported from Mesa -- and will need to be maintained now in the X.Org Server tree. This is needed for DRI2 to be able to tell what DRI driver to request to load for the given graphics processor.

Eric's calling on these patches to be merged for X.Org Server 1.17 with his plans to just use xf86-video-modesetting for the Raspberry Pi when paired with the in-development VC4 Gallium3D driver and DRM/KMS driver.