"With the memory management work set in the ATI driver
via a mix of TTM and GEM, the ATI kernel mode-setting is also
getting ready to be released as a staging driver within the Linux
2.6.31 kernel. The announcements this week have not been only about
the GPU and Linux kernel, but the Radeon driver rewrite has also
been merged to master. As we discussed in yesterday's news post,
this Radeon Mesa re-write brings several key improvements
immediately and there are still more features to come.
"As can be seen from the many posts in the Phoronix Forums there
are many excited individuals looking forward to an improved
open-source ATI Linux graphics stack. Intel stole much of the
attention last year when they introduced the Graphics Execution
Manager in their driver for memory management and then rolled out
kernel mode-setting along with support for DRI2, UXA, and other
features, but now it is AMD's turn to push out their improvements.
The invasive work within the Intel driver stack has caused a few
pains and killed the netbook experience in Ubuntu 9.04, but they
are still working their way out of these regressions."
