The xf86-video-chrome Driver Is Now "Stable"

The xf86-video-chrome driver, which is the open-source VIA Linux X.Org driver from the One Laptop Per Child project, now says their driver is "stable" after fixing up some rendering bugs.

The xf86-video-chrome driver was forked from the xf86-video-via driver a few months back and it basically strips out all of the old crud (ShadowFB, pre-RandR-1.2 support, etc) and focuses just upon the graphics chipset for the OLPC devices bearing VIA graphics. It also brings its own kernel DRM and does not utilize the recent work for kernel mode-setting and TTM/GEM on VIA, as the VIA Linux community is just badly fragmented with each segment having its own driver it seems.

This driver is now used in OLPC's latest software images and there is now a "stable1" snapshot from their Git repository at Laptop.org. This week they also went ahead and stripped out XAA 2D acceleration support so that only EXA is left.

This message was made on the OpenChrome mailing list. Meanwhile, the VIA TTM/GEM and KMS efforts by James Simmons continues to move along. This much-improved DRM driver can be used in combination with the OpenChrome driver, but the bits that play well with the in-kernel mode-setting and memory management aren't yet mainline.