Xorg has some new drivers available.
 

I was nosing around the good ol' Xorg ftp and noticed recently they've added two new drivers to the mix.

xf86-video-amdgpu
xf86-input-libinput

Now the xf86-input-libinput is a evdev-like driver for input (mouse, keyboard, joystick) and actually, has support (if enabled) in xfce4-settings-4.12.0's design. I tested it, and it's a fairly decent driver, but the mouse movements are a bit raw and leave your muscle memory a bit off. I actually tested it and it's okay. In case, you might be wondering, libinput is the new input API layer for usage with Wayland.

Now xf86-video-amdgpu is a total newbie to me. I'm not sure what this does (if it works with xf86-video-ati or replaces it for certain GPUs is unknown to me as I can't test it). I did try and build it, and it builds, but as far as what it targets, I don't know yet, but all it says in the manpages is it's for Radeon based cards.

Figured a few Slackware users might find this interesting.

Hi...

Although I don't use Slackware, thank you for your post. I did find a couple of pages regarding "amdgpu," if it helps any... :)

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...MDGPU-Released

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...il/081501.html

Regards...

The amdgpu driver is going to require a newer (4.2.x+) kernel. It's in source/x/x11/src/driver/ in -current, but is blacklisted for now.

The libinput driver has been around for a while. It doesn't seem to work as well as the existing input drivers (yet).

It does seem to capture about any event button that is in the system. Right now on my BLFS box, libinput is loaded for my X session as it seems to be a more preferred default driver. Evdev is there but seems lower on the priority list. So far it seems to have mapped my keyboard, mouse, joystick, and system power buttons. If I'm not mistaken, evdev's driver does this too.

I don't want to assume, but it seems the libinput driver is more for Xorg + Wayland setups. I do find it interesting Xfce4 would support it directly with the xorg driver though. I wonder if this is a hint at eventual Wayland support coming, or just tapping into new device drivers and interfaces?

I found out what the amdgpu driver is for. Apparently from an article on Phoronix I saw earlier, it's a new driver to specifically target AMD R9 series GPUs.

More precise, the AMDGPU is for AMD R9 series GPUs and beyond, while the "classic" Radeon driver is "deprecated" right now, as LEGACY. Similar with what happenend to R128 video driver.

So, the ATI's X.org graphics stack is, today, something like:

R128 -> ATI -> AMDGPU

The ati driver isn't deprecated. The only AMD/ATI driver that did get deprecation status was xf86-video-radeonhd. The xf86-video-r128 driver is a stub driver that works off xf86-video-ati, however it is a DRI1 generation driver that runs off the driver core library use by the xf86-video-ati driver which is DRI2 based.

The xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-amdgpu drivers work off two very different code banks and are not related, and there was no mentioning anywhere I found of xf86-video-ati being classed as deprecated, or becoming a stub driver to xf86-video-amdgpu any time in the future.