RadeonHD CS Driver Gets EXA Improvements

For those interested in playing with the latest open-source ATI code but don't want to dive into kernel mode-setting or the new AtomBIOS parser, you may want to test out the CS branch. The CS branch was started last week by Luc Verhaegen as it turns all calls made by the driver into macros. This was done due to GCC not optimizing the inline functions within the xf86-video-radeonhd driver on OpenSuSE, but now the performance of these calls is much more efficient. This driver branch also introduces a command submission infrastructure for R500 MMIO (Memory Mapped I/O) to allow the use of the GPU's CP (Command Processor) without depending upon DRM (Direct Rendering Manager).

The new work committed today to the CS branch are EXA improvements. Specifically, there is now hardware acceleration for EXA downloading and uploading from the screen. This support comes in the form of two commits just minutes ago. Luc Verhaegen had also mentioned to us that he is starting work on EXA Render support as well.