Conference videos on GStreamer, 3D drivers and Wayland

Wayland 1.0 is scheduled to be released before the end of the year Among the freely available video recordings from the GStreamer Conference 2012, held at the end of August in San Diego, is a presentation by Kristian Høgsberg in which the developer explains the Wayland display server architecture that he originally authored. In the presentation, Høgsberg mentions that Wayland 1.0 is scheduled for release before the end of the year; according to the developer, this version will mark the point from which the protocol and API will be considered stable and will, therefore, only be extended but no longer modified in incompatible ways. A major section of the presentation discusses optimum video rendering techniques under Wayland.

In another presentation video, Intel developer Eric Anholt provides a development overview of Mesa 3D and the Intel graphics core drivers it contains. Among other things, Anholt talks about performance improvement work that is currently in progress. These improvements include an LLVM shader compiler for Intel's 3D drivers and the relocation of the GL dispatcher to a separate thread; this measure is intended to detach the acceptance of an application's OpenGL instructions from the actual driver processing to spread the workload across two CPU cores. Anholt says that proprietary drivers already operate this way. The developer also speaks highly of his cooperation with the Valve developers when working on the Linux version of Left 4 Dead 2; he mentions that the Valve programmers were very pleased about the superior insight into driver behaviour that they had with the open source drivers. Anholt briefly launches the game during the presentation to demonstrate some rendering errors that still occur with the Intel driver.

A further presentation provides details of Opus, an audio codec that was recently approved as an official Internet Standard. Kernel and ALSA developer Takashi Iwai explains the current developments within the ALSA project; this project develops the kernel's audio drivers and the required userland support on which the Linux audio software is directly or indirectly based. The video recording of the GStreamer Status Report provides an overview of the current developments around the GStreamer multimedia framework that is often used with GNOME and KDE. Details of version 1.0 of GStreamer can be found in the keynote; various new features of this version, which is expected to become available before the end of September, were recently summarised on LWN.net.

(crve)