Plans Being Drafted To Upstream Intel's New "Xe" Linux Graphics Driver

[Ruckizucki]

Well, yeah, if you want to be pedantic about it, Xorg is not technically "abandoned", since it is still seeing some maintenance. Obsolete, yeah that applies whether it gets bugfixes and minor patches or not.

The producer of a thing does not define it's obsoletism. The user does. Mayne people still are using Windows XP/7. And most of them are doing it, because they don't see any of teh later versions of a worthy replacement that actually would make XP obsolete.

[hwertz]

Just to note, the 11th gen CPUs (Tigerlake) explicitly have a 12th-gen GPU on them. At least I hope the driver supports them, since I have a Tigerlake in my current notebook.

One thing not addressed, WHY are they doing a seperate Xe driver? I can tell you. The current i915 kernel driver, Gallium driver, and Vulkan driver are quite performant and feature-complete, EXCEPT they are missing a few Vulkan extensions needed for Proton or Wine+VKD3D to provide full DX12 support. "Bindless textures", in general operating modes where games can freely remap bits of video card memory (well GPU shared memory I guess for integrated GPUs) into the game's address space. i915 driver doesn't support this. My understanding is pre-Xe hardware physically can't support this mode of operation (various functionality assumes the textures, shaders, etc. are laid out in memory in a certain order, not scattered around in RAM as the game sees fit). That makes it totally sensible to clone the existing i915 driver, and do the full rewrite Xe needs to support the more flexible usage it supports while stripping out a bunch of old kruft. (The other choice, patching into i915, would have meant a slower pace of development since one would have to be careful to maintain current behavior for older GPUs; and you'd end up with so many places with "Xe" and "pre-Xe" codepaths, you'd almost have 2 drivers in one anyway.)