The Linux kernel 2.6.35 was released today, and I compiled and installed it before all the download links appeared on kernel.org’s front-page thanks to Akregator.

There hasn’t been an official release of Tux-On-Ice for this kernel version yet, but I still went and booted 2.6.35 with Radeon KMS support enabled by default. I should say that I don’t notice any performance improvements since the last time I tried this thing, and in particular, stencil buffers seem to be still unsupported by my Mesa/kernel drivers combination, which makes Frogatto fall back to using fading for level transitions, as opposed to the cool iris effect used otherwise.

(I might even bug the Mesa developers about the stencil buffer thing if I like KMS enough now...)

Nonetheless, the VSync support in the Radeon KMS driver, just like in 2.6.34, is much better than the crap AMD ATI's proprietary suite has to offer. Watching videos in VLC with no tearing at all is just wonderful.

It’s one of those moments where I can’t decide whether I want features, or quality. Right now KMS appears to offer more quality than UMSm if only because it has VSync at all, but as far as I can see, the UMS driver is more mature in terms of OpenGL features. Granted, I may give the AMD ATI Catalyst 10.7 drivers a try later now that the SuperTuxKart issue I mentioned before appears to be fixed according to their changelogs.

EDIT: only a few hours after, I decided to file a bug report for Mesa, now #29350. Let’s hope for the best!