[Intel-gfx] xf86-video-intel 2.5 release planning

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2008-07-31 11:56-0700 Jesse Barnes wrote:

> 6. No more XAA
> Back in 2.2, we made EXA the default acceleration architecture for the driver.
> It obviously wasn't quite ready back then for everything people were throwing
> at it, but OTOH it didn't have some of the fundamental shortcomings of XAA.
> It looks like it's finally ready though, so assuming Carl has EXA performance
> well in-hand, we should be able to delete the XAA code altogether (which will
> be nice since it doesn't support several features and has bugs we don't want
> to fix).

Jesse is well aware of this already, but just to let others know here, there
continues to be long-term EXA instability problems compared to XAA that show
up after a week to a month of continuous use, see
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14464.

I never had such problems when using XAA for many years but EXA is stable
enough in the short term that I always run it now and put up with the
necessary reboots.  Thus, I don't really need XAA for my normal X use.
However, availability of the XAA alternative as a benchmark might be
beneficial to the developer who finally attempts to track down this
long-term instability problem.  Also, some users who are used to the XAA
stability may feel stronger than I do about removing it. Anyhow, that is one
potential downside of ripping out XAA which I thought I should mention.

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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