XGI Working On Big Linux Patch For Big Feature

XGI's Linux driver was written off as dead back in the summer of 2008 when Ian Romanick who had been working on the open-source XGI Linux driver through his work at IBM had left the company to go join Intel where he now works on Mesa and Intel's open-source 3D stack. XGI Technology really hasn't put out new hardware lately and has been flying under the radar, but this past January a long-time XGI employee began working on this code.

Jong Lin is the XGI engineer who has been working for the company for sometime and is someone that we communicated with years ago when XGI was in its prime. Last month we found out that for the xf86-video-xgi driver stack he was working on 2D EXA acceleration, EDID with I2C, custom modes of mode-line, and support for the ARM CPU architecture. Jong isn't too familiar with the X.Org development process and this morning he has more questions about it.

Hi Gaetan,

It would be a problem to divide the big patch into small ones because of big features such as EXA support. The individual feature of EXA support is still a big patch.

As I know, Ian was the maintainer of XGI driver by 5/2008 but he hasn't been in charge of it for a long time.

This is what XGI's Jong Lin wrote today to the xorg-devel mailing list. It looks like Jonh is getting ready to send a batch of patches to the list, but apparently the patches are big because of "big features" (hopefully more than just EXA) so Jong is concerned about the length. We'll see what patches end up getting submitted.