Intel's SNA 2D Acceleration Code Sees Rare Activity

Intel's SNA "Sandybridge New Acceleration" for 2D acceleration via their deprecated xf86-video-intel X.Org driver has seen some improvements, which is rare these days considering the for this driver that has been in perpetual version 3.0 development for the past six years.

It looks like the xf86-video-intel 3.0 release will never officially be released given there hasn't even been a new development release of it in five years. The 3.0 milestone was their release to officially default to the SNA accelerated support in place of their EXA-derived UXA acceleration architecture. The 3.0 release has been so long in development that it was going to be the version that added XMir support prior to that being canned years ago already.

But with the generic GLAMOR 2D-over-OpenGL acceleration taking off and the hardware-independent xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver plus more Linux desktops switching over to Wayland, it's simply unlikely we will ever see the real xf86-video-intel 3.0 release. Plus this Intel DDX driver hasn't even received SNA back-end work for newer generations of Intel graphics. But there still are some xf86-video-intel Git commits from time to time for those using X11 on the desktop and preferring this Intel-specific DDX code over GLAMOR+modesetting.

There's been a fresh batch of SNA commits merged to xf86-video-intel. The latest work is principally cleaning up compiler warnings and other code issues. So if you are still using xf86-video-intel, go forth and pull down the latest Git.