Direct Rendering Infrastructure

DRI-1.0
Original authors	Precision Insight, Tungsten Graphics
Developer	freedesktop.org
Release	August 1998 (1998-08)
Stable release	2.4.x / February 2009
Written in	C
Platform	POSIX
Type	Framework / API
License	MIT and other licenses
Website	dri.freedesktop.org

DRI-2.0
Original author	Kristian Høgsberg et al.
Developer	freedesktop.org
Release	September 4, 2008 (2008-09-04)
Stable release	2.8 / July 11, 2012 (2012-07-11)
Written in	C
Platform	POSIX
Type	Framework / API
License	MIT and other licenses
Website	dri.freedesktop.org

DRI-3.0
Original author	Keith Packard et al.
Developer	freedesktop.org
Release	November 1, 2013 (2013-11-01)
Stable release	1.0 / November 1, 2013 (2013-11-01)
Written in	C
Platform	POSIX
Type	Framework / API
License	MIT and other licenses
Website	dri.freedesktop.org

There are two graphics hardware drivers: one resides inside of the X display server. There have been several designs of this driver. The current one splits it in two portions: DIX (Device-Independent X) and DDX (Device-Dependent X)

Glamor will simplify the X server, and libGL-fglrx-glx could use the libDRM of the radeon open-source driver instead of the proprietary binary blob.

Rendering calculations are outsourced over OpenGL to the GPU to be done in real-time. The DRI regulates access and book-keeping.

The Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) is the framework comprising the modern Linux graphics stack which allows unprivileged user-space programs to issue commands to graphics hardware without conflicting with other programs. The main use of DRI is to provide hardware acceleration for the Mesa implementation of OpenGL. DRI has also been adapted to provide OpenGL acceleration on a framebuffer console without a display server running.

DRI implementation is scattered through the X Server and its associated client libraries, Mesa 3D and the Direct Rendering Manager kernel subsystem. All of its source code is open-source software.