Compensating for long time with no news with lots and lots of them

Yeah, I know that it has been quite a while since I last time wrote about news from the Intel Linux Graphics land. But as an excuse for such a long delay, I can say that it wasn’t because we had nothing to comment about – but on the contrary, we had sooo many things happening that I really could get a free time to write something.

With so many happenings in the past weeksˆWmonths, it is hard to know where to start. But I’ll try to cover the most relevant events which happened since the last update.

As one of the coolest things which happened in the past month, I must mention the OSTS 2012 conference. OSTS stands for Open-source Technology Summit, and it is an Intel-internal (with some guests of course, among them, naturally, Linus Torvalds himself ) event which aims at gathering all the Intel open-source developers in one amazingly beautiful place between the states of Oregon and Washington. The event takes place in Skamania Loudge, one of the most beautiful places I’ve been to, and it happened on the first week of March.

While there, I finally had a chance to discover the rest of the team in person (yeah, it is really nice to have people faces matching the names who were just voices on the phone and irc handles in the past). And, of course, it was a huge opportunity to discuss many of the projects we’ve been working on in person (alongside discussing the politics, open-source, football, french history and pretty much everything else ).

Besides technical stuff, the conference itself was amazing, and it is great that Intel organizes it and makes it such a success – I really hope to be able to attend the future iterations of it as well.

But back to the news, let me cover some of the major highlights of the Intel Linux Graphics project which we had in the past month or so.

First of all, the 2012.02 Intel Linux Graphics stack release was released, bringing a full-featured Ivy Bridge platform support on the hardware side and OpenGL 3.0 compatibility on the software one. The support for GL 3.0 is a huge leap forward for open-source graphics landscape, and I’d like to congratulate all the developers who were working on it for the past months. You did an amazing job guys, congratulations for shaping the open-source world and making it move ahead in such a great pace!

One day after the 12.02 stack release, Chris Wilson has released xf86-video-intel 2.18, featuring hundreds of new commits and improvements. But the work on the 2D driver by no means stops at this point – we already have lots and lots of new commits there, most of which are related to the SNA technology. It is still considered experimental, but at the same time it is already quite ahead of the UXA backend in many trends.

Still on the 2D support side, Chris Wilson has also released Cairo 1.11.4 and, a couple of days later, stable Cairo 1.12 version. This is the first major Cairo version in years, and it comes with an amazing set of features and performance improvements in all aspects. Check those two articles on Chris Wilson blog for some of the highlights of those releases.

Moving to the kernel project, we have an amazing number of features as well. Within a couple of hours from each other, Jesse Barnes has published his first set of patches for the Valley View support, and I’ve sent my patches for Haswell enablement. Both series of patches has already received a couple of iterations of updates, and have already been covered by phoronix reviews. Another major step towards full Open-Source support in not yet released GPUs!

Still on Kernel, Daniel Vetter has released a couple of snapshots of his drm-intel-next tree, and initial patches for the 3.4 kernel has already landed in Linus Torvald’s tree. And yet, while the next version of kernel is still taking place, we already have a a huge amount of patches getting ready for the one after it – the 3.5 one. Among those, are the logical context switching patches from Ben Widawsky, gtt handling improvements, lvds improvements, more Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge workarounds, improved semaphores for display plane, enablement (hopefully final) of RC6 by default for Sandy Bridge, and many many others. Things are looking great, and the development pace is amazing. I’ll try to cover more details of those patches in one of the next blog posts.

And to finish with the Kernel side of the story, Dave Airlie has managed to nail-down the long-standing issues we had while suspending, which resulted in random filesystem corruption and other nasty side effects. The patch was already sent to Linus, so things on the suspend-resume side are looking sweet again.

On Mesa side, Eric Anholt has sent the initial GLSL 1.40 patches. GLSL 1.40 is a bit different from its 1.30 counterpart in the sense that there is not much use for it outside the OpenGL 3.1, which is not there yet. Meanwhile, Mesa 8.0.2 was released, with additional bug fixes and improvements in this stable edition of it. So far, Mesa 8.0 looks very impressive, from both stability and performance point of view. Once again, amazing job guys!

Besides those news, we had thousands of new patches meanwhile, which I won’t be able to cover in this post. The development goes on and on, and so far 2012 looks quite promising for the Intel Linux Graphics project.

And, last but not least, this probably will be my last post while I have 0x1E years of age. In a couple of hours, I’ll have to go through a bit-shifting in age, coming to a very nicely looking number of 0x1F years (which looks yet more amazing in binary, being represented by a beautiful number of 0b11111). Almost coming of age by now .