Pixman 0.30 Release Has Major Back-End Work

A major release of the Pixman rendering library happened on Wednesday. Pixman 0.30 now has some major back-end improvements and other changes to better the pixel manipulation software.

Per the release announcement, the major features to Pixman 0.30 for this critical and widely-used X.Org/graphics component are:

- Support for high-quality image downscaling
- Much improved ARMv6 assembly
- Improved rendering quality for gradients
- Improvements to the SSE2 backend
- Improvements to MIPS DSPr2 backend
- Improvements to test suite

The changes exciting me with the release are the SSE2 back-end improvements that can benefit a great number of AMD/Intel processors, the MIPS and ARMv6 improvements will benefit some low-power systems, and support for high-quality image down-scaling is another win for this open-source pixel manipulation library that is widely-used in the Linux world.

For more, hit up Pixman.org.