Two collections of patches (1, 2) proposed by the maintainer of the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) have incorporated numerous graphics hardware support improvements into the main development branch. This is the development branch which will produce Linux version 2.6.28 at the end of this year or at the beginning of next year.

The developers included the Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) which takes over some of the graphics drivers' memory management tasks and co-ordinates the access to the graphics chip's processing units; this is designed to take care of some limitations in the current driver design and to improve performance.

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Also: Linux 2.6.28-rc1 Kernel Released