Intel's Glamor Architecture Is Becoming Glamorous

Zhigang Gong of Intel China has published a new Linux patch today that enables the rest of the Glamor acceleration architecture functions to be used by the Intel X.Org driver. Glamor is a new means of accelerating 2D over OpenGL for the DDX driver.

Glamor has been a side project of some developers for several months now. Originally it was intended that Glamor would be part of the X.Org Server, but then later it was re-engineered so that Glamor will be its own standalone library that the DDX drivers can tap into if they wish to offer this acceleration method.

In November Intel driver patches for Glamor were published, but they didn't hook into all of the Glamor rendering functions for doing 2D over OpenGL.

Being published today is a new patch that takes advantage of all of Glamor for xf86-video-intel.

From the Intel mailing list, "This commit enable all the rest glamor rendering functions. Tested with latest glamor master branch, can pass rendercheck."

Using Glamor requires building the Glamor library from Git and then patching the xf86-video-intel driver. The last time I tried using Intel Glamor was last month, but the driver ended up producing a segmentation fault. I'll try again in the next few days to see how things go.

Patches for using Glamor in the Radeon or Nouveau drivers (or any other X.Org driver) haven't been published. However, at least the Radeon/Nouveau drivers have Gallium3D support (where as Intel is still living in a classic Mesa DRI driver world) and can take advantage of the generic Xorg state tracker as a generic DDX driver that leverages KMS and does provide similar 2D acceleration support over via the 3D engine.

In related news, coming up in the next few hours I'll be putting out new performance numbers of the Intel SNA acceleration architecture.