David Airlie Talks About RandR 1.4, Reverse PRIME

Aside from the real story behind Wayland and X, another Linux graphics focused presentation at LCA 2013 was by David Airlie talking about his work on RandR 1.4 / PRIME.

David Airlie's presentation at the Linux Australia conference was on "teaching the X Server new tricks." The talk mainly covered his recent work on PRIME / RandR 1.4 with GPU hot-plugging and GPU offloading and then more recently with Reverse PRIME. The work is mostly centered around supporting multi-GPU systems better in X.Org with systems like NVIDIA Optimus laptops or the increasingly popular USB-based DisplayLink devices.

As a future project, Airlie still talks about GPU switching support for the X.Org Server but that remains a difficult situation due to needing to re-initialize the compositor cleanly on switching graphics processors. Another future item is Post-Xinerama/Shatter for breaking up rendering between GPUs.

David Airlie's presentation is embedded below. The rest of the Linux.Conf.Au 2013 videos can be found from this Linux.org.au directory.