Before Ending 2019, Vintage SiS X.Org Driver Sees A New Release

xf86-video-sis 0.12.0 is available this week as a new version of the SiS display driver for X.Org systems in supporting Silicon Integrated Systems' display hardware.

This X.Org user-space mode-setting driver has seen its first update in four months but prior to that it hadn't seen any update to the open-source code in three years.

This new release is organized by Kevin Brace who also put out the v0.11 release four months ago and continues to be interested by these vintage X.Org drivers. Kevin has been organizing the new releases with whatever patches have accumulated over the years since the drivers were last touched.

With the new xf86-video-sis 0.12.0 release, it's the first release supporting X.Org Server 1.20. X.Org Server 1.20 has been out for nearly two years now and due to API changes the existing SiS driver wasn't compatible. But taking two years to issue a compatible driver (and months after Kevin did the v0.11 release) seem to indicate there is little to no one actually still making use of this driver and if so not updating their software stacks.

So xf86-video-sis 0.12 is now available for anyone that may want to try running this DDX driver for user-space mode-setting on these vintage graphics cards with xorg-server 1.20. There hasn't been any recent work on trying to make a SiS kernel mode-setting driver.