Intel Is Readying The xf86-video-intel 2.15 Driver

With it nearing the end of the quarter, Intel's OSTC team working on their Linux graphics driver stack is readying their quarterly driver update. Along with the Linux 2.6.38 kernel and Mesa 7.11 as some of the key components to make up this quarter's Linux package, the xf86-video-intel 2.15.0 X.Org driver will also be released. In preparing for this milestone, Chris Wilson has released the first development snapshot of this DDX driver.

"Some time ago, Cyril asked me if there might be a snapshot for 2.15. The good news is that today is that day! And here it is," announced Chris.

Unfortunately, xf86-video-intel 2.15 isn't particularly exciting. Found in the 2.15 code-base is mostly a bunch of bug-fixes, but no new hardware support (Sandy Bridge already landed in xf86-video-intel 2.15.0 and it's too early for Ivy Bridge yet), no performance enhancements, and no other new features are introduced in the user-space X.Org driver side.

Some of the bug-fixes in xf86-video-intel 2.15.0 are addressing green pixels when displaying partially off-screen videos, deferred creation of glyph cache to generation start-up, incorrect maximum addresses for video decoder states, failure to handle over-sized temporary surfaces, relaxing tiling corruption on older Intel "Gen2" hardware, and a crash when destroying a foreign DRI drawable.

Plus other changes mentioned in the announcement along with the source download links for this 2.15 snapshot that is marked as xf86-video-intel 2.14.901. Per the usual trend as of late, Chris Wilson's work dominates the Intel driver's change-log. Look for the official xf86-video-intel 2.15 and Intel 2011Q1 packages to be released in a couple of weeks.