The developers of the T2 Linux project, which is developing a package manager and platform for creating Linux distributions, have announced the restoration of support for the XAA (XFree86 Acceleration Architecture) 2D acceleration architecture in the X.Org Server, developed in 1996 for hardware acceleration of 2D graphics operations in the X server. Support for XAA was removed from the X server back in 2012 after most current DDX drivers transitioned to EXA, SNA, GLAMOR, or UXA architectures.
The restoration of XAA support was carried out with the aim of speeding up the operation of the distribution on vintage and retro systems, as well as on classic workstations that were shipped with Unix systems. The restoration made it possible to bring back the ability to use 2D acceleration on systems with very old video cards, for which software rendering had to be used since DDX drivers for these video cards do not support current acceleration architectures.
The reinstated XAA support has been tested with video 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 the use of XAA has enabled smoother window movement, reduced CPU load, and ensured correct framebuffer support in TrueColor mode (24-bit per color channel).
