Intel X.Org Driver Gets Fixes, Broadwell Acceleration

Besides publishing their Haswell hardware documentation, coming out of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center today is the latest Intel 3.0 X.Org driver development release.

Chris Wilson of Intel announced today the xf86-video-intel 2.99.907 driver, which is the latest test pre-release prior to their big 3.0 milestone. Significant with this driver is the use of SNA acceleration by default over UXA for providing a faster 2D experience with Intel hardware. SNA has long been an option configurable through the xorg.conf but is now finally being enabled by default.

Within the xf86-video-intel 3.0 development series there was also short-lived support for Canonical's XMir layer, but that work was ultimately backed out.

There's also a wide-range of other performance optimizations and bug-fixes that have accumulated for the 3.0 release.

With today's xf86-video-intel 2.99.907 driver update there is more bug-fixes plus Intel Broadwell support for the DDX that was committed to Git earlier in December. The Broadwell support has already landed in Mesa and the Linux 3.13 kernel DRM while now it's also found within the mainline xf86-video-intel driver for X.Org Server support.

Details on around the 100 changes found in this latest xf86-video-intel 3.0 development release can be found from the mailing list announcement.