Fedora Switching Away From Intel X.Org DDX Driver

[combuster]

Meanwhile, Intel hasn't issued a stable driver update in three years and their last development snapshot of xf86-video-intel 3.0 is two years old.

So no stable tags means exactly what Michael? That the driver isn't being worked on? Check again:

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/log/

It is not abandoned, and the article shouldn't lean toward that conclusion either. If it's performance differences I would like to see benchmarks. If it's security issues, I would like to see unresolved CVE's.

I know that Intel's team saw a couple of great developers leaving but if you have any hard evidence that xf86-video-intel is bust - please present them with facts to support that claim.

Lack of stable tags is not one of them.

According to this, Debian devs haven't mentioned better reasons for the switch as well: https://tjaalton.wordpress.com/2016/...g-driver-on-x/

[nomadewolf]

Isn't SNA faster than Glamour?

[J?rnS]

@combuster: the main problem is that every distro needs to follow the commits of the Intel DDX very closely. This is a lot of work and every distro ends with very different snapshots of the Git repository. Then you have one bug in distro A and another bug in the distro B. Ask mgraesslin about this topic, he is not amused as the maintainer of Kwin, for example.

[-MacNuke-]

Isn't SNA faster than Glamour?

If you can live with tearing, rendering errors and artifacts... yes, it's faster.

[franglais125]

Isn't SNA faster than Glamour?

No difference except for synthetic benchmarks [1] (benchmarks from May 2016). There is now a new xserver version, so modesetting might have improved.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...-DDX-May-Tests

[combuster]

@J?rnS

You have this, well I wouldn't call it an issue, across the distros already. One of the prime differences is selection of packages accepted as baseline if we don't take rolling release distros in account. How much work is backporting for distro devs if packages they ship aren't exactly vanilla? They did their math around it already.

Granted, there is a chance for more granularity when there are no stable releases from time to time, but if there are not enough maintainers and developers for Kwin ie and not enough people that can test it - we have a bigger problem on our hands. In any case, such problems should be reported and resolved during distro development phases.

[balouba]

I've different, but as much issues with modesettings as i have on the intel DDX on my Skylake laptop (except the intel one is noticeably faster and supports more functionality...).

I suspect the choice is mainly about maintainability as per their thread - modesetting is easier to fix, too, and wayland is around the corner.

Personally i'd rather they fix the intel DDX in an ideal world though ;-)

[degasus]

No difference except for synthetic benchmarks [1] (benchmarks from May 2016). There is now a new xserver version, so modesetting might have improved.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...-DDX-May-Tests

That is the reason why it is dropped. SNA is by far faster than glamor, both in GPU time and in CPU overhead. But it is still an acceleration for X11 rendering calls. Those "synthetic benchmarks" are the only one in the linked article which use SNA or glamor at all. We are not talking about OpenGL here.

So we have a huge plattform dependent acceleration, which is only used for a few legacy applications. GTK/QT will likely avoid them soon, too. While the IVB/HSW implementation of SNA is great, SKL requires almost a new implementation from skretch. Do you think anyone will do this for the next GPU?

[zboszor]

There are 3-4 year old POS hardware with PineView and Glamor does not work with OpenGL 1.3.

[Luke_Wolf]

There are 3-4 year old POS hardware with PineView and Glamor does not work with OpenGL 1.3.

3-4 years? You mean 6-7 years. It's 2017 not 2014, and anyone running that processor needs to upgrade, period. There might be something to be said for holding onto it if it was desktop parts (though in that case you plug in a graphics card and problem solved) but the early Atoms (this is a 2010 Atom part) were so slow that nothing really ran particularly well on them at the time, and I can't imagine how horrible they are now.