Mandriva Improves Silicon Motion Driver

Along with VIA releasing a new open-source X.Org video driver, there is work underway on improving the status of another open-source graphics driver. Silicon Motion is perhaps more obscure than VIA Technologies when it comes to integrated graphics, but they primarily specialize in low-power graphics chips for tablet PCs.

The xf86-video-siliconmotion driver usually only receives a handful of commits a year and from a few different developers such as Adam Jackson, Egbert Eich, and Alex Deucher. However, this month there has been some significant improvements to this tablet PC driver.

The xf86-video-siliconmotion driver most notably is picking up EXA acceleration, X-Video, and RandR 1.2 support. The RandR support does include Rotation support. Code for the SMI501 Chipset has also been added.

This new Silicon Motion driver work is being done by Paulo Cesar Pereira de Andrade, Arnaud Patard, and Francisco Jerez. These developers work for Mandriva and have managed to get their hands on Silicon Motion documentation and register guides, which explains this revitalized work. Aside from the commits hitting the xf86-video-siliconmotion tree last night, there were only six commits made to the driver this year. Following these most recent commits, the Silicon Motion X driver has been bumped to version 1.6.1.