[Intel-gfx] xf86-video-intel 2.5 release planning
Jesse Barnes
jbarnes at virtuousgeek.org
Thu Jul 31 20:56:06 CEST 2008
It's my turn to handle a 2D driver release again, so I've been thinking about
what we should include (and remove!) in the 2.5 release. I've created a
blocker bug for the release, 16926, and I'm interested in hearing about bugs
you think should be added. The 2.4 release was a bit late; I'd like to avoid
that this time around, and want to do the first -rc hopefully by mid-August.
Target highlights for this release include:
1) usable EXA support
2) support for GEM (if supported by the currently running kernel)
3) support for kernel mode setting (again, if the underlying kernel supports
it)
4) no more video tearing with textured video & XvMC
5) Bug fixing
6) removal of XAA code
See below for details.
1. Usable EXA support
Carl recently pushed some fixes that should make EXA better than XAA
(finally): http://cworth.org/blog/technical/. Assuming the users reporting
performance regressions with EXA vs. XAA are happy with the changes, things
are looking good here.
2. Support for GEM
The drm-gem branch of xf86-video-intel has been under development for awhile
now, and gracefully falls back in the case where no kernel support is
available. I'd like to merge this into master to get it some more coverage.
Ideally, we'd get the Mesa drm-gem branch merged into master as well, making
it much easier for people to play with GEM stuff (just boot a new kernel or
insmod some new DRM modules and restart), but the Mesa bits need a little
more review first.
3. Support for kernel mode setting
Along the same lines, we'd like to make it easy for people to test the shiny,
new kernel mode setting bits. The 2D driver changes aren't hugely invasive
(and they give me an excuse to clean some stuff up), so I'm planning on
merging them to master, again to make testing of new kernel bits easier for
everyone.
4. No more video tearing
One of our #1 complaints since adding textured video support is tearing. It
seems to occur in both composited and non-composited configurations,
depending on what else is going on in the system. With recent changes to
Mesa, hopefully the composited case can be solved by making the compositing
manager use scheduled buffer swaps (i.e. using glxSwapBuffers with
vblank_mode=3 or similar), but in the non-composited case we'll need to make
our Xv and XvMC code a bit smarter.
5. Bug fixing
Catch all for fixing display bugs, suspend resume problems, improving LFP
detection, fixing SDVO bugs, etc. (there are quite a few display bugs Zhenyu
& I want to tackle for this release)
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).
Please direct comments & questions to myself and the list.
Thanks
Jesse
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