DRM2 Proposed At XDC2012

Improvements to the Direct Rendering Manager were proposed on Friday during XDC2012.

Kristian Høgsberg, Martin Peres, Timothée Ravier, and Daniel Vetter shared their views on what they're calling DRM2.

For the basics of what DRM2 comes down to it attempts to fix the DRM authentication policy and improve buffer sharing. One benefit for what this would allow for non-technical readers is that it would allow for GPGPU (OpenCL/Compute) support without an X.Org Server running for the graphics drivers. While no patches have yet to materialize, DRM2 would rework the "master" handling by splitting DRM master into MASTER and GEM_MASTER while allowing multiple GEM_MASTER.

DRM2 would not break user-space interfaces compared to the current driver handling today. We'll see if the patches come about and are upstreamed in the future. More information below for those interested in the technical details of the DRM2 proposal.

The good Franconian/Bavarian beer must be doing good for X.Org developers this week: DRI3 was also proposed on the fly as X.Org developers got together for their annual gathering.