What Do You Want In Linux Drivers This Year?

Posted by Michael Larabel on January 30, 2009

NVIDIA has already released quite a few Linux drivers this year already that improve their VDPAU support and stabilize their OpenGL 3.0 implementation. Yesterday AMD had then released its first proprietary Linux driver of 2009 that brought OpenGL 3.0 support. While both sides are off to a good start, what else do you want to see from them and their drivers in 2009?

On the open-source side there is a lot to get excited about. Gallium3D will soon be landing in Mesa, more hardware will receive kernel mode-setting support, more of the X.Org drivers will turn to using a kernel memory manager like GEM or TTM, improved video decoding support, and there's many other features that we may see this year in the open-source drivers. But what will we see this year within the high-performance proprietary drivers from ATI/AMD and NVIDIA?

AMD will certainly be introducing X-Video Bitstream Acceleration (XvBA) this year, but over the course of last year they are reaching a feature parity with their Windows Catalyst driver now that the fglrx driver supports OverDrive, CrossFire, and other features. On the NVIDIA side, what else is there to come? More CUDA enhancements? OpenCL? Finally, a graphical installer that can run within X? More video playback improvements?

Tell us in the Phoronix Forums what you hope to see from the proprietary and open-source X.Org display drivers in 2009.

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