Keith Packard Talks X.Org At OSCON 2008

Following this morning's keynote at OSCON 2008, Intel's Keith Packard had talked about the status of X. This short talk wasn't too different from his recent blog posting and what he had talked about at FOSDEM, but there were a few interesting tid-bits of information. Enclosed are some of the quick notes from his talk.

- Much of the information in this presentation was largely the same as what was shared in talks earlier this year by Keith... Some of his and Intel's goals for the Linux desktop are tear-free acceleration, a flicker-free boot process, fast user switching, ability to resize the frame-buffer, support for multiple frame-buffers, etc.

- DRI2 (Direct Rendering Infrastructure 2) still needs quite a bit of work but is generally in good shape.

- Delivering support within XvMC (X-Video Motion Compensation) for non-MPEG video formats is still a priority.

- The Intel X driver will be getting more power saving improvements (LVDS power savings, etc).

- With regards to the Radeon vs. RadeonHD drivers, they don't have "as much love" but Packard hopes the Radeon driver will move along and will be "up to speed" with the Intel driver in the next six months. Keith also is urging that the developers behind these two drivers to cooperate instead of trying to compete.

X Roadmap:

- The GEM (Graphics Execution Manager) kernel module should be integrated for the Linux 2.6.28 kernel. Intel's GEM-based driver should be merged to master by the end of August.

- DRI2 will hopefully be merged to master by the end of August too.

- Kernel-based Mode-Setting should be stabilized within the next month or two.

- Intel is still working on XvMC support for i915 and i965 IGPs. The i915 XvMC support is further along as it doesn't have the same programming constraints as the i965.

- In general, these key improvements will hopefully be done within the open-source ecosystem by the end of September.