We're now ramping up for the Q1 release, which means we're switching from what has been nearly 100% time on bug and regression fixing to 100% bug and regression fixing. I just pushed out xf86-video-intel 2.6.2 to get some of our stable fixes into the world so people have a better base for testing KMS. By the end of March we should have a new release out with current 2D, a new Mesa tarball with the latest fixes since 7.4, and hopefully a kernel 2.6.29 with KMS.
In my spare time I've been working on a GL backend for cairo. My assertion for some time has been that anything we're doing with accelerating Render, we could do with less developer time and faster runtime with GL. It took about 2 weeks of me flailing around learning how to do GL, and I got cairogears up and running at about 4 times the speed of Render, on various 965s.
The code's still pretty rough -- it doesn't check for extensions it needs, relies on NPOT textures when it could use rectangular textures, doesn't do shaders for gradients, etc. But actually most of the time on the code has been spent fixing our 3D driver. There were some texture upload issues, BO cache explosion issues, drawpixels issues, DRI2 viewport overhead issues, and my current one is that the latest commit in cairo-gl ends up hanging both 915s and 965s after a while in cairogears.
I'm hoping some other people interested in this stuff might feel like picking it up and playing with it. It's not terribly complicated code, I don't think, there are other backends to compare to, and cairo's test suite is wonderful for validating what you're trying out. The code is in:
git://people.freedesktop.org/~anholt/cai
git://people.freedesktop.org/~anholt/cai
