svn commit: r44490 - head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status

Tue Apr 8 16:42:18 UTC 2014

Author: pgj
Date: Tue Apr  8 16:42:17 2014
New Revision: 44490
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/doc/44490

Log:
  - Add 2014Q1 status report for the Graphics stack
  
  Submitted by:	dumbbell

Modified:
  head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2014-01-2014-03.xml

Modified: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2014-01-2014-03.xml
==============================================================================

--- head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2014-01-2014-03.xml	Tue Apr  8 15:52:52 2014	(r44489)
+++ head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2014-01-2014-03.xml	Tue Apr  8 16:42:17 2014	(r44490)
@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@
 
     <!-- XXX: Keep the number of entries updated -->
     <p>Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work!  This report
-      contains 32 entries and we hope you enjoy reading it.</p>
+      contains 33 entries and we hope you enjoy reading it.</p>
 
     <p>The deadline for submissions covering between April and
       June 2014 is July 7th, 2014.</p>
@@ -2027,4 +2027,78 @@ device vt_efifb</pre>
       <task>Move <tt>lang/gcc</tt> from GCC 4.7 to GCC 4.8.</task>
     </help>
   </project>
+
+  <project cat='ports'>
+    <title>The Graphics stack on &os;</title>
+
+    <contact>
+      <person>
+	<name>&os; Graphics Team</name>
+	<email>graphics-team at FreeBSD.org</email>
+      </person>
+    </contact>
+
+    <links>
+      <url href="https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics">Graphics stack roadmap and supported hardware matrix</url>
+      <url href="https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/WITH_NEW_XORG">WITH_NEW_XORG status</url>
+      <url href="http://trillian.chruetertee.ch/ports/browser/trunk">Ports-related development repository</url>
+    </links>
+
+    <body>
+      <p>On the kernel side, the Radeon KMS driver was merged in
+	<tt>stable/9</tt> and will be available in &os; 9.3-RELEASE.
+	Now both the 9.x and 10.x branches share the same support for
+	Intel and AMD GPUs.</p>
+
+      <p>The next big tasks are the updates of the DRM generic code and
+	the <tt>i915</tt> driver.  Both are making good progress and the
+	DRM update should hopefully be ready for wider testing during
+	April.  An update of the Radeon driver is on the to-do list, but
+	nothing is scheduled yet.</p>
+
+      <p>On the ports tree and packages side, the update to Cairo 1.12
+	mentioned in the last quarterly report is ready to be committed,
+	as people who tested it either reported improvements or no
+	regressions.  As a reminder, the switch from Cairo 1.10 to 1.12
+	causes display artifacts with xf86-video-intel 2.7.1, but fixes
+	similar problems with other hardware/driver combinations.
+	Furthermore, Cairo 1.12 is required by Pango 1.36.0, GTK+ 3.10
+	and Firefox 27.0.  A <q>Heads up</q> mail will be posted to the
+	<tt>freebsd-x11</tt> mailing-list when this update goes
+	live.</p>
+
+      <p>In the graphics stack's ports development tree, new Mesa ports
+	are being worked on.  Those ports are required to support GLAMOR
+	(the GL-based 2D acceleration library used by Radeon HD 7000+
+	cards for instance) and OpenCL (using the GPU to perform
+	non-graphical calculations).  We were able to execute some
+	"Hello World" OpenCL programs and play with OpenCL in darktable,
+	but there are some compatibility issues between Clover (Mesa's
+	libOpenCL implementation) and Clang/<tt>libc++</tt>.</p>
+
+      <p>We are preparing an alternate <tt>pkg(8)</tt> repository with
+	packages built with <tt>WITH_NEW_XORG</tt>.  The goal is to ease
+	the usage of the KMS drivers and move forward with the graphics
+	stack updates.  The main <tt>pkg(8)</tt> repository will still
+	use the default setting (<tt>WITH_NEW_XORG</tt> set on
+	<tt>head</tt>, but not on the <tt>stable</tt> branches).</p>
+
+      <p>This will pave the way to <tt>WITH_NEW_XORG</tt> deprecation
+	and the removal of the older stack.  The current plan is to do
+	this after 10.0-RELEASE End-of-Life, scheduled on January 31st,
+	2015.  By that time, the only supported releases will be
+	8.4-RELEASE, 9.3-RELEASE and 10.1-RELEASE.  &os; 9.3 and 10.1
+	will be fully equipped to work with the newer stack.
+	Unfortunately, &os; 8.x misses the required kernel DRM
+	infrastructure: supporting X.Org here cripples progress on the
+	graphics stack and, once <tt>WITH_NEW_XORG</tt> is gone, we will
+	not support 8.x as a desktop anymore.  Therefore, please upgrade
+	to 9.3 or 10.1 when they are available.</p>
+     </body>
+
+    <help>
+      <task>See the <q>Graphics</q> and <q>WITH_NEW_XORG</q> wiki pages
+	for up-to-date information.</task>
+    </help>
+  </project>
 </report>
