Intel KMS vs. UMS With Ubuntu 10.04

"Last week we published benchmarks looking at the ATI Radeon KMS vs. UMS performance and found the user-space mode-setting support with the ATI driver (that is also limited to using DRI1 with these older code-paths) to perform significantly faster than the newer kernel mode-setting routes in most instances. To see how the performance difference is on the Intel side between the kernel mode-setting and user-space mode-setting implementations we ran a set of benchmarks on this side as well using Ubuntu 10.04.

"Intel's Linux graphics driver was the first open-source driver to implement support for an in-kernel memory manager (in the form of the Graphics Execution Manager) followed by kernel-based mode-setting support. The GEM memory work landed with the Linux 2.6.28 kernel back in 2008 followed by the Intel KMS support and the kernel mode-setting infrastructure came with the Linux 2.6.29 kernel in early 2009. The mainline Intel KMS support is barely a year old, but support for the older user-space mode-setting code paths were already dropped. The UMS support was dropped with the xf86-video-intel 2.10 driver delivered back in January to reduce the driver's code-base, close many open bugs surrounding user-space mode-setting, and since KMS is in fact the future. Intel is right now in the process of preparing the xf86-video-intel 2.11 driver that is its second KMS-only X.Org driver release."

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