XDS 2008 Quickly Approaching

XDS 2008 is happening next week in Edinburgh, Scotland as the X.Org Foundation's second conference for the year. Since last week when last mentioning XDS 2008, there have been a few more attendee confirmations but it still looks like this event will be slightly underpopulated. The good news though is that the program is still getting more talks towards the last minute.

This three day affair will have at least three talks on X.Org input (improving input latency, introduction to pointer acceleration, and a summary), an X.Org Foundation update, a Radeon talk by Jerome Glisse, DRI2 version 2, Red Hat's Plymouth boot experience, the state of Gallium 3D, Gallium 3D on the Intel 915 series, run-time power management for graphics hardware, and graphics testing.

Jerome Glisse, the mastermind of the original open-source R500 (xf86-video-avivo) driver, will be talking about kernel-based mode-setting (KMS), memory management, cache coherency, command submission, and other topics as it pertains to open-source and ATI.

The DRI2 (Direct Rendering Infrastructure 2) talk is on the improvements made to DRI2 to make it not dependent on TTM and the removal of SAREA and and locks. This DRI2 work was committed to Mesa and the X Server yesterday.

For those out of the loop on Red Hat's Plymouth, it's a replacement for RHGB (Red Hat Graphical Boot) that will premiere with Fedora 10. Plymouth is much-improved over RHGB and it also takes advantage of kernel mode-setting to provide a pleasant experience for the end-user.

When it comes to the graphics testing talk, Intel's Gordon Jin will be talking about end-user testing with what Intel needs. I may also decide to give a talk on the Phoronix Test Suite 1.2.0 and performance profiling / testing.

The XDS 2008 program in its continually-revised form can be found on the X.Org Wiki. While the program is coming along, there is still under 30 people scheduled to be at this development summit. AMD's Alex Deucher will not be attending this event now that they're getting close to open-source R600/770 3D and John Bridgman will also not be attending. Additionally, Daniel Stone, who organized most of this event, won't be attending either.

During the X Developers' Summit next week expect coverage, photographs, and audio/video recordings on Phoronix.