Tungsten's New VIA DRM, Mesa Driver Published

Earlier this month we shared that Tungsten Graphics was creating a new VIA 3D stack for one of their clients. This new work has many improvements over the current Mesa and DRM code both on the technical level as well when it comes to what's supported for use by end-users. This morning the code for Tungsten's new support has been pushed out to OpenChrome.

On the Direct Rendering Manager side there is now an integrated memory manager through a new TTM implementation. This DRM code though isn't finalized yet and still needs some more work in the device initialization area.

On the Mesa side their new OpenChrome OpenGL driver supports OpenGL 1.3, S3TC decompression, GL_ARB_pixel_buffer_objects, GL_EXT_frame_buffer_objects, and other features. The current Mesa support is just for the VIA CX700 IGP and older hardware. The Chrome 9 series OpenGL capabilties are expected through a Gallium3D driver.

Right now this latest DRM and Mesa code is living in Git branches, but with time it's expected to be merged to master considering the significant benefits this code has over the current open-source VIA 3D stack. The announcement of this new code drop and other details can be found on the OpenChrome mailing list.