EXA Acceleration For The Old ATI Rage Driver

If you happen to be an unfortunate soul still using an old ATI Rage graphics processor, the "R128" driver now has EXA acceleration support after about a decade and a half of the hardware being around.

With XAA support set for removal within the X.Org Server, many of these ancient graphics processors / drivers could go without 2D acceleration for anyone out there still using such outdated hardware but still insisting on running the latest software. However, for users of the ATI R128 open-source driver, there is now EXA acceleration support for this X.Org driver.

An independent user, Connor Behan, decided to implement EXA support with the XAA support set to be stripped away. The R128 driver then has accelerated support for solid, copy, and composite operations with EXA. Testing has been done with and without DRI support, with and without the Composite extension, and it's support looks to be in good shape for this XAA successor. Hardware cursor and X-Video support are also supported, but it might need additional work according to the developer.

Tacking in EXA support to the Rage 128 open-source driver is about a 2,000 line patch, which for now can be found on the xorg-devel mailing list until integration into the DDX driver.

The R128 driver supports all ATI Rage 128 graphics cards, including the ATI Rage Fury, XPERT 128, and XPERT 99 AGP cards. This is hardware from the late 90's in the days of AGP 2x, OpenGL 1.2, Microsoft Direct3D 6.0, 250nm manufacturing, and a transistor count in the single-digit millions.