Luc Modularizes Mesa, DRI Drivers

Last month at the [email protected] meeting in Belgium, Luc Verhaegen gave a talk on cleaning up the Linux graphics driver stack. This talk was met by some that agreed with his views and, well, others that didn't exactly see eye-to-eye with him. He shared with everyone his views on changes that should be made to the Mesa/X.Org/DRM stack, including some greater modularization, in an effort to make the testing / build process easier, drive greater maintainability of drivers, and unifying components by providing more shared libraries and formalizing different APIs.

Luc showcased his xf86-video-unichrome driver that he modularized according to his proposed changes, but that didn't satisfy everyone since the VIA Unichrome driver is not nearly as complex as the Radeon, Nouveau, or Intel Linux drivers. As a result, Luc has begun modularizing everything himself in an attempt to prove the feasibility of this design.

Over on his FreeDesktop.org Cgit page Luc is now hosting branched Mesa DRI drivers for the Intel i810, Intel i9xx, Mach64, MGA, R128, Savage, SiS, Tdfx, and Unichrome that are done according to his philosophy. There's also the Mesa DRI SDK headers that he has created. The modularized Mesa Radeon driver will also be there once the FreeDesktop.org server has updated. Luc also has other changes pending that should be committed shortly.