The developers of the T2 Linux project, which focuses on the package manager and platform for creating Linux distributions, announced the restoration of support for the XAA (XFree86 Acceleration Architecture) 2D acceleration architecture in the X.Org Server. This architecture was developed in 1996 to leverage hardware acceleration for 2D graphic operations in the X server. Support for XAA was removed from the X server back in 2012 after most relevant DDX drivers were transitioned to the EXA, SNA, GLAMOR, or UXA architectures.
The restoration of XAA support was undertaken to enhance the performance of the distribution on vintage and retro systems, as well as on classic workstations that were shipped with Unix systems. The restoration enables the use of 2D acceleration on systems with very old graphics cards, which had previously relied on software rendering since the DDX drivers for those cards do not support current acceleration architectures.
The reintroduced XAA support has been tested with graphics cards such as ATi Mach-64, ATi Rage-128, SiS, Trident, Cirrus, Matrox (Millennium/G450), Permedia2, Tseng ET6000, and Sun Creator/Elite 3D. It is noted that utilizing XAA has improved window movement smoothness, reduced CPU load, and provided proper framebuffer support in TrueColor mode (24-bit per color channel).
Source: opennet.ru
