Spring is coming. I'm certain of it because I know for a fact that it's not Spring right now and seasons have a tendency to wrap around. Obviously that means I need to work a bit on the acceleration code for X11. It's just like going to a doctor, sure, it sucks, but at the back of your mind you know you need to do it.
So what's different about this code? Well, it's not an acceleration architecture. We're reusing Exa. It's the implementation.
Currently if you want to accelerate X11, or more precisely Xrender, you implement some acceleration architecture in your X11 driver. It may be Exa, Uxa, Xaa or something else (surely also with an X and A in the name because that seems to be a requirement here). Xrender is a bit too complicated for any 2D engine out there, which means that any code which accelerates Xrender will use the same paths OpenGL acceleration does. In turn this means that if we had an interface which exposed how hardware works we could put OpenGL and Xrender acceleration on top of the same driver. One driver, accelerating multiple APIs.
That's exactly what Gallium is all about so it shouldn't be a big surprise that this is what we're doing. We're simply writing an Xorg state tracker for Gallium in which Exa is implemented through the Gallium interface.
So with a Gallium driver, besides OpenGL, OpenGL ES and OpenVG you'll get X11 acceleration. I'm specifically saying here X11 because after implementing Exa we'll move to accelerating Xv, which will give us a nice set of ops which are accelerated in a typical X application.
