Eight Months Later, Intel X.Org 3.0 Driver Still In Development

Eight months ago today was the first development release of xf86-video-intel 3.0, the X.Org Intel DDX driver, with support for SNA by default and XMir. While Intel reverted their plans to support XMir, this major Intel DDX driver update still hasn't surfaced.

There's been many xf86-video-intel 3.0 development releases, but to this day it still hasn't shipped yet... Most of the ongoing work for this DDX is still about better optimizing the SNA acceleration architecture to replace UXA by default. The most recent development snapshot was tagged in late March.

Those wishing to help in testing this latest Intel 3.0 X.Org driver, which will hopefully be released before Wayland takes over the Linux desktop, can be easily built from the xf86-video-intel Git. Ubuntu users can easily test the latest Intel open-source driver code via the Oibaf PPA. It's not too much of an issue that the 3.0 official release hasn't happened yet given that most distributions ship some form of the Git code from the past few months, and that most of the exciting Intel Linux graphics work happens within the kernel DRM and Mesa, but still it's a bit surprising how long this release is taking to materialize.