Set DRI driver options via the CLI using dritune (updated 2x)

Aaaah, what a nasty cold I catched that I could not blog for ten days. However, I have not been totally idle during that time and found out that enabling texture tiling in the Intel X.Org driver finally not only works properly on my 915 chipset, but gives a breathtaking speed boost! Warzone 2100 is now playable at high resolutions on my netbook with the attached LCD monitor.

No fiddling with xorg.conf is required for this tweak (in fact many distributions don't ship with that file by default anymore, but it is still supported for troubleshooting drivers). What we do today is setting screen resolution and orientation using RandR, and driver options via ~/.drirc. Look into that file if it exists on your system. Yuck! XML! Not very unixy.

Well, there is DRIconf, a GUI tool that lets you view and modify the driver options and also create profiles for different applications. On the other hand, there are people like me who don't like to install GUIs with many dependencies just for toggling one or two checkboxes. In fact, I was astounded by the absence of command line tools for setting DRI options, so I took over that job and created dritune.

Download v0.02 - tarball, .deb package

Copy the dritune script from the tarball to some location in your path. It has xmlstarlet as its only uncommon dependency, so you need to install it from the repository. Starting dritune without any parameters gives you some usage help. Typically you would do dritune list to get the list of DRI options for the first screen, then dritune info <option> to show a description and possible/current settings for an option, then dritune set <option> to modify the setting. There is much more it can do and it behaves very script-friendly. Best of all, it does a great job at keeping you away from XML :-)

Feedback, bug reports and intents of packaging are welcome.

Bugs so far:

• Running dritune on another machine over ssh will retrieve the driver options from the local machine/display and save changes to the remote machine. Baaad! As a fix, run dritune this way: DISPLAY=":0" dritune.

To do:

• Calling xmlstarlet is slow. In particular, it is subjectively slow when dumping all options to stdout, because it is called three or so times per option. Either the number of calls has to be reduced, or all information should be gathered on startup, or some sort of caching should be implemented.
• Fix Bash throwing seek errors when X is running but for some reason not accessible.