GLAMOR Acceleration Makes It Into Ubuntu 13.10

One week after writing about the sad state of RadeonSI / GLAMOR support in Ubuntu 13.10, the GLAMOR EGL library has made it through the Saucy Salamander's queue and landed into the archive for next month's Ubuntu 13.10 release.

As of today, the GLAMOR library is now found in Ubuntu 13.10 via the glamor-egl package that's currently at version 0.5.0. The GLAMOR library was synced from Debian Git. The package can be found via saucy-changes.

The GLAMOR library provides for a generic means of 2D acceleration using 3D/OpenGL. GLAMOR is required for supporting the AMD Radeon HD 7000/8000 series graphics cards with RadeonSI Gallium3D. Additionally, GLAMOR can be optionally used over EXA for older generations of Radeon graphics cards. GLAMOR also complements the Intel driver as another 2D option besides EXA and SNA acceleration architectures.

GLAMOR is still a bit buggy for Radeon HD 7000 series users but at least it's now found in Ubuntu 13.10 to provide a better "out of the box" experience.

For the state of the modern AMD Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" graphics cards on the open-source Linux driver, see this week's AMD RadeonSI Graphics Driver Still Troublesome On Linux article.