[Xorg-driver-geode] Plans for next releases

[Martin-Éric Racine]

2011/4/1 Christian Gmeiner <christian.gmeiner at gmail.com>:
> 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