Intel TTM Officially Dies, Code Stripped Away In Mesa

TTM, or Translation Table Maps, the memory manager developed by Tungsten Graphics, is now dead. TTM has been dwindling away since last year when Intel introduced the Graphics Execution Manager (which has since entered the mainline Linux kernel), but now the code for this memory manager has been dropped from Mesa's Intel driver.

The Intel Linux graphics stack has migrated entirely to using GEM instead of TTM, while other open-source drivers are using a combination of the GEM API with some TTM code (a GEM-ified TTM manager). The Graphics Execution Manager is designed to be simpler than TTM from the developer's perspective and its code was in a better state to be merged into the mainline kernel than the Tungsten memory manager. The advent of the Graphics Execution Manager has led to the redesign of DRI2, the UXA acceleration architecture, and numerous other changes throughout the Linux stack.

The Git commit removing the TTM back-end has a message by Tungsten's Jakob Bornecrantz of "RIP ttm, its been fun knowing you."