Wednesday, November 16, 2016

a quick note for users/distros

At this point, I haven't pushed a new release tag for xf86-video-freedreno to update to latest xserver ABI.  I'm inclined not to.  If you are using a modern xserver you probably want to be using xf86-video-modesetting + glamor.  It has more features (dri3, xv, etc) and better performance.  And GL support on a3xx/a4xx is pretty solid.  So distros with a modern xserver might as well drop the xf86-video-freedreno package.

The one case where xf86-video-freedreno is still useful is bringing up a new generation of adreno, since it can do dri2 with pure-sw fallbacks for all the EXA ops.  But if that is what you are doing, I guess you know how to git clone and build.

The possible alternative is to push a patch that makes xf86-video-freedreno still build, but only probe (with latest xserver ABI) if some "ForceLoad" type option is given in xorg.conf, otherwise fallback to modesetting/glamor.  I can't think of a good reason to do this at the moment.  But as always, questions/comments/suggestions welcome.