Last night, Dave Airlie released libdrm 2.3.1, which set the stage for all the pieces of the X.Org 7.4 prereleases to actually work (with a couple mesa patches). If you’d like to test 7.4, here’s how. This assumes you’re already running an ~arch (testing) system–if you aren’t, you might want to hold off on testing hard-masked packages. This may not work with binary drivers–particularly ati-drivers. It looks like nvidia-drivers has preliminary support for xorg-server 1.5.

echo "
# xorg-server-1.5 prerelease
=x11-base/xorg-server-1.4.99*
=media-libs/mesa-7.1*
x11-proto/dri2proto
=x11-libs/libdrm-2.3.1*
" >> /etc/portage/package.unmask
emerge -va xorg-server
emerge -va1 $(qlist -I x11-drivers)

I’ve still got 16 more packages to bump before everything’s up to date, but the main parts are in place.