Please backport xserver-xorg-video-ati from Intrepid to Hardy

[Miguel Martinez]

Current Hardy version: 1:6.8.0-1
Current Intrepid version: 1:6.9.0-1ubuntu1

I built it successfully on my Hardy system after downloading the source and applying the patch from http://packages.ubuntu.com/source/intrepid/xserver-xorg-video-ati. The main benefits are much improved EXA support in r100/200 and initial EXA support in r300/400/500 hardware. TexturedVideo is also supported now, and working hardware is expanded. The patch applied also gives initial hw support to the recently released Radeon 4850 card.

The full changelog is available here:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg-announce/2008-June/000596.html

Caveats: Support for older pre-radeon cards has been dropped into a separate driver. I'm not sure how this is handled by Intrepid.

[Oibaf (oibaf)]

Note that the improved EXA and Xv support require also updated DRM kernel module (included with kernel 2.6.26), at least on r500 (not sure for the others).
Older cards are now in separated packages:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/intrepid/source/xserver-xorg-video-r128
http://packages.ubuntu.com/intrepid/source/xserver-xorg-video-mach64

[Vladimir Mityukov (mityukov)]

Currently, there is also good EXA and TexturedVideo support.
People said it's quite usable, at this moment.

Couple of links:
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9951

Unfortunately, proprietary driver becomes only worse and worse (they constantly add more features, instead of fixing at least 2D & Video...), so, it might be a good Idea to include open-source analog (which give almost all the needed features, at least for R500, at the moment) into the repos?

[Michael Casadevall (mcasadevall)]

This appears SRU worthy since it allows additional hardware and fixes bugs which is SRU criteria, please file an SRU bug. If they reject it, then please reopen this backport bug.

Marking INVALID