The Fallback Mode-Setting Driver Is Improved

One week after the release of the new X.Org mode-setting driver there's another release with more changes.

Last week David Airlie announced the release of xf86-video-modesetting as a generic, un-accelerated DDX driver that in theory should work with any hardware that's being handled by a Linux KMS (kernel mode-setting) driver. The xf86-video-modesetting driver just relies upon the generic KMS interface with the kernel to allow X.Org to work atop it.

The xf86-video-modesetting driver just provides a shadow frame-buffer (ShadowFB), but over xf86-video-fbdev/xf86-video-vesa or alternatives, thanks to its KMS poking there is RandR support for this X.Org driver. Likewise, this driver supports driving multiple monitors. David developed this driver when working on GPU hot-plugging support and other work going back to last year.

The xf86-video-modesetting driver could be looked at as similar to the Gallium3D Xorg state tracker in Mesa that's designed to work with any KMS-enabled hardware, but that does provide accelerated support. David Airlie said in our forums that he isn't too interested in adding acceleration support to xf86-video-modesetting and that for his purposes this driver is effectively feature complete.

As far as the xf86-video-modesetting 0.2.0 release, it has a few fixes plus some build system clean-ups. The release announcement can be read on the mailing list.