Glamor Acceleration For The Intel X.Org Driver

Zhigang Gong of Intel has published patches this morning that integrate Glamor acceleration support into the xf86-video-intel DDX driver.

Glamor is the new project that provides OpenGL-based 2D acceleration for X.Org and was presented back in September and the server-side bits are set to be merged into the X.Org Server. Today's patches setup the bits in the xf86-video-intel driver to take advantage of Glamor for Intel hardware.

Glamor won't be the default means of acceleration in the Intel DDX driver, at least for now, but the support has to be toggled at build-time using an --enable-glamor switch. With the support for this GL-derived acceleration, it's enabled along the UXA paths and depends upon an EGL context.

Hooking in Glamor support to a DDX driver amounts to a few hundred lines of code, at least for xf86-video-intel. I haven't yet seen any similar Glamor integration patches for xf86-video-ati or xf86-video-nouveau yet.

It will be interesting to see how the Intel acceleration performs for the stock UXA acceleration, UXA with SNA (Sandy Bridge New Acceleration), and Glamor.

The three patches that introduce the Intel Glamor acceleration can be found on the intel-gfx mailing list. Obviously, a Glamor-ized X.Org Server is also required, which should be xorg-server 1.12+.