The Generic Mode-Setting Driver Updated

The xf86-video-modesetting generic KMS-dependent driver for X.Org has been updated. Separately, the call for pulling the GLX_ARB_create_context support at long-last into the X.Org Server has been made.

David Airlie announced the release of xf86-video-modesetting 0.3.0 this week. This driver is used for cases where there is a DRM/KMS driver in use for a given graphics card, but there isn't any hardware-specific DDX driver. The xf86-video-modesetting doesn't do any GPU hardware acceleration, but is just a generic implementation (similar to xf86-video-fbdev) using the KMS interfaces.

This xf86-video-modesetting driver can be used for cases like Exynos, ASpeed, Matrox, and other uncommon hardware configurations.

This third release for the Linux KMS fall-back driver isn't particularly exciting but there's a number of fixes offered. There are 24bpp improvements, which benefit Cirrus and thus if using the KMS driver within QEMU.

In separate Linux graphics news, this week Ian Romanick finally sent in the pull request to implement the server-side support for GLX_ARB_create_context in the X.Org Server. The GLX_ARB_create_context extension support is needed as part of OpenGL 3.0+ support. This extension is used for specifying at context creation what GL interfaces will be used.

Patches for this have been around since last year but are only now being pulled into the xorg-server Git. This support will therefore be part of X.Org Server 1.13, which is slated for release in September.