2011/4/1 Christian Gmeiner <[email protected]>: > I want to know what the plans for the next releases of the driver are. > Currently > I am using the geode driver for an embedded system and I am not that happy > with the speed of the driver with enabled hardware acceleration. At the moment > the driver preforms much better if I disable acceleration.
That is quite possible, given how libpixman constantly changes and the driver is, in its current state, having to work its way around it. This being said, a few Geode developers recently gathered and started looking into ways to improve the speed of the driver. There's already a few minor fixes in GIT that haven't been released and more are coming. The main issue we have right now a lack of developers interested in the Geode. In theory, AMD assigned two engineers to maintain the driver but, in practice, their assignment was short-lived and they have been transfered to the former ATI team right after their contributions to 2.11.9. In other cases, access to the hardware remains, but the motivation to work on such antiquated hardware is gone; developers always want to work on the next cool thing, rather than perform boring maintenance on existing code. This leaves us with very few people who still have any interaction with Geode hardware that have sufficient coding skills to maintain the driver. Bear in mind that the above only concerns the LX component of the driver. Meanwhile, the GX2 component is barely usable. On this point, AMD clearly indicated that supporting anything older than the LX is of extremely low priority and, as such, they haven't even provided their two engineers with test hardware that features a CS5535 and GX2. None of us have access to GX2/CS5535 hardware either, so it's really up to someoen from the community with sufficient coding skills to step up and bring the GX2 component at least up to the LX component's health status. > I am using a Debian based system with X.Org X Server 1.7.7. I assume that you are using the version of the Geode driver that ships with Debian/stable? If that's the case, you're already missing on a few fixes. I suggest trying to build the driver currently in unstable against stable X development packages. > Where are the current problems in the area of hardware acceleration? Mostly that it isn't well-integrated with the best coding practices of the X.org community, because that's how NSC and AMD, initially coded it. > Is it planned to introduce a KMS driver? There's been some talks about it. See our wiki page (URL in the README) for details. Again, lack of interested coders remains the main obstacle. I hope that the above answers shed some light. Feel free to ask for clarifications as appropriate. Best Regards, Martin-Éric _______________________________________________ Xorg-driver-geode mailing list [email protected] http://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg-driver-geode
