126 Changes To The Intel Driver + New VA Back-End
Posted by Michael Larabel on November 13, 2011
Intel's Chris Wilson released xf86-video-intel 2.16.902 over the weekend, which brings 126 changes since the last release candidate less than three weeks ago. There's also a new VA-API video acceleration back-end to report on.
The 126 changes to the Intel DDX since the end of October have been done single-handedly by Chris. A clear majority of the changes in this second release candidate pertain to SNA, the Sandy Bridge New Acceleration architecture.
The earlier release candidate brought many changes too (Chris Wilson carried 252 changes in that release) along with working around some Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge hardware issues.
The mainline xf86-video-intel driver doesn't yet carry the Glamor acceleration support patches for taking advantage of the GL-based acceleration architecture. Nor would I expect to see Glamor merged to mainline prior to the xf86-video-intel 2.17 release.
The source package and official release announcement can be found on the Intel mailing list.
In related Intel Linux graphics news, there's also a new VA-API back-end. Haihao Xiang of Intel has published a branch of VA-API for a VA/EGL back-end. The vaapi-egl driver is a generic implementation for VA-API with EGL and then there are back-end drivers for Intel and PowerVR hardware support using an EGL display with OpenGL ES rather than GLX/OpenGL. This EGL/GLES VA-API video acceleration support is good news for mobile devices and Wayland.
News on the VA/EGL Video Acceleration API back-end can be found in this mailing list entry.
The 126 changes to the Intel DDX since the end of October have been done single-handedly by Chris. A clear majority of the changes in this second release candidate pertain to SNA, the Sandy Bridge New Acceleration architecture.
The earlier release candidate brought many changes too (Chris Wilson carried 252 changes in that release) along with working around some Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge hardware issues.
The mainline xf86-video-intel driver doesn't yet carry the Glamor acceleration support patches for taking advantage of the GL-based acceleration architecture. Nor would I expect to see Glamor merged to mainline prior to the xf86-video-intel 2.17 release.
The source package and official release announcement can be found on the Intel mailing list.
This is the second release candidate in preparation for the upcoming 2.17.0 release. We will appreciate any feedback we can get from testing of this snapshot, and thanks to everyone who tested and reported upon issues in the last snapshot. In particular, I would like to thank Clemens Eisserer for his thoroughness in testing and reporting issues in SNA.
A very old bug demonstrating that nobody has ever used alpha maps, and a couple of more recent mistakes were found.
-Chris
In related Intel Linux graphics news, there's also a new VA-API back-end. Haihao Xiang of Intel has published a branch of VA-API for a VA/EGL back-end. The vaapi-egl driver is a generic implementation for VA-API with EGL and then there are back-end drivers for Intel and PowerVR hardware support using an EGL display with OpenGL ES rather than GLX/OpenGL. This EGL/GLES VA-API video acceleration support is good news for mobile devices and Wayland.
News on the VA/EGL Video Acceleration API back-end can be found in this mailing list entry.
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