Several Old DDX Drivers Got Updated For X.Org Server 1.19, Even Voodoo Graphics

Written by Michael Larabel in X.Org on 17 January 2017 at 09:13 PM EST. 15 Comments
X.ORG
X.Org Server 1.19 was released last November while today there was finally an X.Org developer giving some love to the older DDX drivers for those still with vintage GPUs and wanting to run the modern xorg-server.

A number of the less common xf86-video DDX drivers hadn't seen new releases for "ABI 23" support as used by X.Org Server 1.19+ until Matt Turner took to getting the updates released today where as previously the ABI fixes were just residing in Git.

The new DDX driver releases today include the xf86-video-tdfx 1.4.7, xf86-video-sis 0.10.9, xf86-video-mga 1.6.5, xf86-video-chips 1.2.7, xf86-video-siliconmotion 1.7.9, xf86-video-nv 2.1.21, xf86-video-glint 1.2.9, xf86-video-trident 1.3.8, xf86-video-sisusb 0.9.7, xf86-video-savage 2.3.9, xf86-video-i740 1.3.6, and xf86-video-r128 6.10.2


Aside from supporting the latest X.Org driver, some of these display drivers see some other small fixes too but none of the other changes appear really major. The change-logs for each driver can be found via xorg. There's even a few fixes to the dropped xf86-video-nv driver while generally the other updated drivers are much older, including for vintage SiS and Voodoo graphics hardware.

If there's anything funny about these updates, these old drivers like 3dfx Voodoo and MGA were quicker to see a new driver release supporting this latest xorg-server video ABI quicker than there was for xf86-video-intel. The xf86-video-intel driver hasn't seen a new (development) release in two years since v2.99.917 and the last stable release was three years back, but if using xf86-video-intel Git there was the ABI 23 support last summer.

We'll see how much longer some of these X.Org drivers continue to be haphazardly maintained... But hey, that's part of the beauty of open-source software.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week