Pre-AMDGPU xf86-video-ati X.Org Driver Sees A Round Of Improvements

It's rare in recent years to have anything to report on xf86-video-ati, the X.Org driver for the display/2D experience for pre-GCN Radeon graphics cards. But this week has been a large batch of fixes and improvements for those using this DDX driver with pre-HD7000 series hardware.

Longtime Radeon Linux driver developer Michel Dänzer has landed a number of commits already this week of various fixes/cleanups, some of which were inspired by the xf86-video-amdgpu DDX driver that is used for current-generation hardware with the AMDGPU kernel driver (unless using xf86-video-modesetting...).

On top of the work already in Git, Dänzer just mailed out 21 more patches. These patches are of porting various applicable xf86-video-amdgpu patches into this older xf86-video-ati driver. Included are mostly fixes but does include Keith Packard's RandR leases bits related to his Linux VR work. RandR leases may prove to be useful for other use-cases, but from a VR perspective, any xf86-video-ati-using graphics card would be much too slow for any meaningful VR work/play.

Anyhow, for those using these aging ATI/AMD graphics cards, these latest fixes/improvements are now available.