The SiS X.Org Driver Gets Some Improvements

Patches have been presented on the X.Org development mailing list that provide a number of fixes and improvements to the ill-loved xf86-video-sis, the SiS X.Org driver.

The open-source SiS X.Org driver provides support for the Silicon Integrated Systems IGPs still out there from the SiS 300 through the SiS 760 and SiS 5598, among other ASICs. While there is also the xf86-video-xgi driver out there for the old XGI Tech graphics cards out there, this SiS driver also supports the XGI Volari Z7 and Volari V3/V5/V8 AGP graphics cards (XGI is derived from SiS).

The work presented today is a set of 15 patches published by Ubuntu's Timo Aaltonen. This work is trying to narrow down the difference between the upstream xf86-video-sis and the "sisfree" driver and then the various forks maintained by Intel, SiS, and Mandriva developers.

None of this work presented today isn't particularly exciting, but is more of cleaning up this open-source graphics driver by removing dead X-Video code, among other items and fixes.

This SiS Linux work is also all happening in the SiS DDX driver and there isn't any yet SiS/XGI kernel mode-setting (KMS) support, a Gallium3D driver, or any new and exciting work happening at this point.

The patch set can be found on the X.Org development list until they end up being merged into the upstream xf86-video-sis Git tree, for those still using this hardware.