"The management of video hardware has long been an area of weakness in the Linux system (and free operating systems in general). The X Window System tends to get a lot of the blame for problems in this area, but the truth of the matter is that the problems are more widespread and the kernel has never made it easy for X to do this job properly. Graphics processors have gotten steadily more powerful, to the point that, by some measures, they are the fastest processor on most systems, but kernel support for the programming of GPUs has lagged behind. A lot of work is being done to remedy this situation, though, and an important component of that work has just been put forward for inclusion into the mainline kernel."
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2006-04-28
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With these changes in the kernel, AMD's new open source drivers and some other projects like Gallium3D* in development, it looks like Linux (and other Open Source OS's) will finally have great graphics performance in the near future (about 1 year?). Kudos to all the people making this possible!
*http://www.tungstengraphics.com/wiki/index.php/Gallium3D
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This work is a foundation for what comes in linux graphics. Gallium Mesa, better support for multiple processes using GPU, direct rendering redirection(with GL compositing) and "DRI2" architecture (new interface between DRI framework and X) rely on this to be included in kernel. On top of it will be the kernel-modesetting, bound to finally put that part where it belongs and bury the linux-fb interface (at least for modern PC 3D cards).
Unfortunately, BSD still lacks the port, so it's possible that it will be left with less features and older, less mantained, drivers if someone doesn't port TTM (Intel chips will have unified TTM/non-TTM driver though, so less bitrotting).