R600/700 Mesa Driver Picks Up Blit Support

While a blitter module was introduced for Gallium3D that uses the 3D engine for blitting, this doesn't help those without blit support that are still running the "classic" Mesa driver stack. Over the night, however, blit support has arrived for the ATI R600/700 Mesa driver. This support arrived in the form of three commits (1, 2, 3) that increase the driver's code-base by around 2,000 lines of code.

The Radeon HD 2000 series hardware and later no longer has a dedicated blitter unit, so the 3D engine is being used here as well for this task. This ATI R600/700 blit support is yet another feature for Mesa 7.8, which should be released by the end of March. This proper blitter support should result in performance improvements for both 2D and 3D acceleration.