Packard Talks About Ongoing Intel Linux Work

Lately we have talked a lot about the Intel Linux driver stack with their ongoing work of switching over to the Graphics Execution Manager for memory management, moving to kernel-based mode-setting, and migrating to the Direct Rendering Infrastructure 2. In the short term, this work has caused some nasty problems, but once the fallout has been addressed, the open-source Intel driver should be in a prime position to perform on all fronts.

Intel's Keith Packard has written a new blog post talking about Sharpening the Intel Driver Focus. In this post Keith talks in detail about mode-setting, 2D acceleration, memory management, and related areas. Beyond stripping out DRI1 and EXA support, it looks like in the near future they soon will strip out the legacy mode-setting support and move entirely to KMS, which would shrink the size of their code-base in half.

As Keith concludes, "The goal is to take the driver we’ve got and produce a leaner, faster more stable driver in the next few releases to come."