GLAMOR 0.5 To Advance 2D Over OpenGL

With the Radeon driver now supporting GLAMOR acceleration -- it works for all hardware, but for Radeon HD 7000 series and newer its the only way of 2D HW acceleration -- this 2D-over-OpenGL architecture became more interesting.

GLAMOR was originally introduced for the Intel driver and developed by Intel engineers, but they already have the wonder SNA architecture and in my GLAMOR testing I have yet to see it outperform "Sandy Bridge New Acceleration" nor offer any other end-user benefits (on the developer side, GLAMOR is nice because it's a smaller code-base and isn't hardware-specific). With the open-source Radeon driver now depending upon GLAMOR, it at least guarantees this 2D acceleration architecture has a future.

Over on the FreeDesktop.org Wiki is a GLAMOR page that does cite the future plan, at least in the eyes of Intel. The latest stable release of GLAMOR is current v0.4.1, but they do have a v0.5 feature-release in the works. The planned features for this next release include full gradient optimizations including linear and radial gradients, large pixmap support (tiling a large pixmap to a texture array since Mesa has a limit of 8Kx8K texture size), full trapezoid optimizations, and fine-tuning of the FBO (Frame Buffer Object) caching mechanism.

The downside to GLAMOR v0.5 is that originally it was planned for release in "early June" and now it's already the end of July without a new release.

At least GLAMOR development hasn't ended but the most recent commit to the GLAMOR Git repository was just one week ago. Aside from the aforementioned features, other recent work includes syncing with the X.Org Server 1.13 API changes, streaming vertex data to VBOs, the trapezoid renderer now uses VBOs, and various other optimizations.

The leading developers of GLAMOR continue to be Junyan He and Zhigang Gong of Intel.