Open-Source GPU Drivers Improved For Linux 3.8

Various improvements to the major open-source Linux graphics drivers will be landing with the Linux 3.8 kernel in the months ahead.

David Airlie updated his "drm-next" Git repository last night with all of the latest code bits ready to be merged for the Linux 3.8 kernel when its merge window opens in the next few weeks following the Linux 3.7 release. He also sent out an email confirmation.

Among the changes now merged are:

- Improvements to the VMware virtual GPU driver, the "vmwgfx" component that's used for guest 3D acceleration of virtual machines running VMware products.

- Lots of open-source Intel driver commits, including putting the Intel Haswell support into good shape. There's also the secure batch-buffers support as they work to address the last of the tearing issues.

- The NVIDIA Tegra DRM driver has been merged.

- Various TTM memory management patches.

There wasn't any Radeon or Nouveau DRM pulls as part of yesterday's drm-next update. With Nouveau there's hope Linux 3.8 may support better Nouveau GPU core/memory re-clocking. VIA kernel mode-setting is also still not ready for merging into the mainline tree. Atomic mode-setting also isn't fully baked and ready for going mainline at this time.

Aside from the kernel graphics driver improvements, Linux 3.8 will have many other interesting features.