X Server 1.6.0 Has Been Released

[phoronix]

Phoronix: X Server 1.6.0 Has Been Released

It's arriving about two months later than originally scheduled (and didn't arrive in 2008 like Intel wanted), but X Server 1.6 has been officially released this afternoon and it wasn't 212 days late like the infamous X Server 1.4.1 release.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=13539

[grantek]

Woohoo! Hopefully support in fglrx will come in Catalyst 9.3, so we don't have another repeat of Ubuntu 8.10 and their h4x3d version of Catalyst 8.10

[Pfanne]

just imagine!
compiz + random 3D application at the same time!

[bulletxt]

"The proprietary NVIDIA driver is compatible with X Server 1.6, while the proprietary Catalyst driver from AMD doesn't yet offer any support for this updated X Server."

I mean, why is NVIDIA always, always, always, always: ahead.

[falloutboy]

just imagine!
compiz + random 3D application at the same time!
+ videoplayback! ... don't be ridiculous ...

[some-guy]

+ videoplayback! ... don't be ridiculous ...
Well, you can use gl output now ;) (thanks to dri2)

This was earlier than I expected

[madman2k]

"The proprietary NVIDIA driver is compatible with X Server 1.6, while the proprietary Catalyst driver from AMD doesn't yet offer any support for this updated X Server."

I mean, why is NVIDIA always, always, always, always: ahead.
because they actually dont use most of the X Server infrastructure, but use their own instead. So to them it is not that a difference whether to replace xserver1.5 or xserver1.6 files.

[Melcar]

"The proprietary NVIDIA driver is compatible with X Server 1.6, while the proprietary Catalyst driver from AMD doesn't yet offer any support for this updated X Server."

I mean, why is NVIDIA always, always, always, always: ahead.


Seen as it was just officially released, one can assume that fglrx will have official support by the 9.4 release. 9.3 would be nice, but I have my doubts.

[susikala]

"The proprietary NVIDIA driver is compatible with X Server 1.6, while the proprietary Catalyst driver from AMD doesn't yet offer any support for this updated X Server."

I mean, why is NVIDIA always, always, always, always: ahead.

That statement is largely false: the FOSS drivers are very well supported on 1.6., and generally closely trace its development.

[Kano]

So will that mean that fglrx will support it now ;)

[FunkyRider]

I have just (last week?) managed to get fglrx 9.2 installed onto my main PC running Ubuntu 8.10 and get compiz + xv worked.

Now I know that after 2 months my video card will be a dead horse again, because FOSS driver is still not out yet and fglrx would have a hard time TRYING to support x server 1.6.

Hope Ubuntu team could give a hand helping those poor fglrx devs to get their driver work on Ubuntu 9.04 by the time it is out. Otherwise it (X server 1.6 DRI-2 fantasy) is going to be a major show stopper for ATI users -- YET AGAIN.

[DanL]

I mean, why is NVIDIA always, always, always, always: ahead.
I don't know, but I do know that complaining about it in a multitude of phoronix.com threads will do little or nothing to change it.

[bulletxt]

because they actually dont use most of the X Server infrastructure, but use their own instead. So to them it is not that a difference whether to replace xserver1.5 or xserver1.6 files.

Basicly you just said NVIDIA is ahead. Also there is no good reason why AMD hasn't done what NVIDIA did. Conclusion: NVIDIA is ahead.

[Vadi]

I have just (last week?) managed to get fglrx 9.2 installed onto my main PC running Ubuntu 8.10 and get compiz + xv worked.

Now I know that after 2 months my video card will be a dead horse again, because FOSS driver is still not out yet and fglrx would have a hard time TRYING to support x server 1.6.

Hope Ubuntu team could give a hand helping those poor fglrx devs to get their driver work on Ubuntu 9.04 by the time it is out. Otherwise it (X server 1.6 DRI-2 fantasy) is going to be a major show stopper for ATI users -- YET AGAIN.

I had a friend who tried to install Kubuntu relatively recently and the graphical installer failed horribly on him.

He ended up compiling "some alpha drive off git" (I suppose that's the oss one) to get it to at least show something.

[bridgman]

Now I know that after 2 months my video card will be a dead horse again, because FOSS driver is still not out yet and fglrx would have a hard time TRYING to support x server 1.6.

Hope Ubuntu team could give a hand helping those poor fglrx devs to get their driver work on Ubuntu 9.04 by the time it is out. Otherwise it (X server 1.6 DRI-2 fantasy) is going to be a major show stopper for ATI users -- YET AGAIN.

We had an fglrx driver ready for inclusion in the 8.10 Ubuntu release; why are you so sure there will be a huge delay with 9.04 ?

Note that DRI2 isn't going to change anything on its own; it's just one of many things which need to be in place to enable RDR, which is what you *really* want ;)

[grantek]

I had a friend who tried to install Kubuntu relatively recently and the graphical installer failed horribly on him.

He ended up compiling "some alpha drive off git" (I suppose that's the oss one) to get it to at least show something.
Ubuntu 8.10 worked fine for me with the OSS drivers on an RV770, so I don't know what the problem would be.

[Kano]

@bridgman

I define "ready" a bit different. Ubuntu got the driver, but it was not in the standard installer package. But there are always other distros out there which would like to use the driver too. Of course you can hack a package to install those provided files for Ubuntu on another system, but do you call that really "ready"?

[bridgman]

All fair points. Let's talk about those though, rather than "not working with the Ubuntu release at all".

[grantek]

Any idea when the XServer 1.6 ABI/API/whatever was frozen enough that binary drivers could depend on it? Or was NVidia still taking a small risk by releasing a driver when it was still in RC status?

I'd still rather the closed-source devs worked on bug fixes and feature completion before supporting prerelease code on prerelease OSes, bleeding edge is where the benefits from having an OSS driver come in.

[BlackStar]

My crystal ball(*) says we'll see XServer 1.6 support on 9.3 or 9.4. Plenty of time for the spring distros to pick it up.

I guess that would be a problem if you wanted to install XServer 1.6 *now*, but fortunately you can use the open drivers if you *really* must ( there's a fetish for everyone, I guess :p )

A storm in a teacup, people.


(*) Just an educated guess - I don't have any insider info or anything. That, and I know how to use the search function of the forum.

Edit:
I'd still rather the closed-source devs worked on bug fixes and feature completion before supporting prerelease code on prerelease OSes, bleeding edge is where the benefits from having an OSS driver come in.
Well said!

[Kjella]

Basicly you just said NVIDIA is ahead. Also there is no good reason why AMD hasn't done what NVIDIA did. Conclusion: NVIDIA is ahead.

If you wanted a system where the kernel is open source, the middle is a big blob and you can run open source applications on top, we already have it. It's called a Mac, and they're much better at it than nVidia is.

Of course AMD can do as nVidia did and make the whole X server into some half-proprietary hybrid but it'd be costly, not open source friendly and most of all way outside what a hardware company should normally do to deliver a driver. If they just wanted to throw a pile of money at it to take the Linux market they could, but then they'd probably also have to go closed source to get an ROI on that investment.

I use nVidias blob but I don't like depending on a blob, and I sure don't want the blobs to grow taking over for more open source functionality. I'd much rather they helped make xserver better so that I don't have to run the blob. Yes, please improve the parts nVidia is overriding but please also keep it open source. I think there's a lot you could help the open source community with without giving away any of the secret sauce...

[bulletxt]

If you wanted a system where the kernel is open source, the middle is a big blob and you can run open source applications on top, we already have it. It's called a Mac, and they're much better at it than nVidia is.

Of course AMD can do as nVidia did and make the whole X server into some half-proprietary hybrid but it'd be costly, not open source friendly and most of all way outside what a hardware company should normally do to deliver a driver. If they just wanted to throw a pile of money at it to take the Linux market they could, but then they'd probably also have to go closed source to get an ROI on that investment.

I use nVidias blob but I don't like depending on a blob, and I sure don't want the blobs to grow taking over for more open source functionality. I'd much rather they helped make xserver better so that I don't have to run the blob. Yes, please improve the parts nVidia is overriding but please also keep it open source. I think there's a lot you could help the open source community with without giving away any of the secret sauce...


mmm...ok yea. However my ATI 2600XT won't work 100% as it should before who knows when. I think 2010 and even in that year I'm sure it will still have limitations... So you talk about open here and open there. I talk about a customer that works and goes to the mall or wherever, gets 150$ from his pocket and buys an AMD card. Goes home, puts it in and realized he's done a mistake, crappy FGLRX, open source driver that is totally incomplete. Now go tell him about open things.

I am still sure NVIDIA will continue to be number 1 for the Linux operating system for next years. Every 1 step AMD does, NVIDIA does 10. And the open source driver will never be feature-rich or optimized as the NVIDIA blob.

[curaga]

So, how's the driver support on DRI2? Only Intel with a release?

[bridgman]

Probably. I doubt that either ATI or NVidia binary drivers will use DRI2. The ATI open source drivers have had DRI2 running for a while, and airlied was spinning gears on a cube using his merged R1xx-R5xx Mesa driver a few days ago, but the memory management code isn't ready to go into the kernel yet. Same goes for Nouveau -- they've also been running on DRI2 for a while but it was built over TTM just like the radeon code.

[elanthis]

Of course AMD can do as nVidia did and make the whole X server into some half-proprietary hybrid but it'd be costly, not open source friendly and most of all way outside what a hardware company should normally do to deliver a driver.

You seem to be under the impression that NVIDIA put forth a lot of effort to replace all those X bits. The reality is that they replaced all those X bits because it resulted in less effort (not more) since they already had all those replacement bits working for the most part. It's really just a port of their Windows GL driver with the minimum amount of glue put in place to get it working.

So far as fglrx being behind... who cares? I'd rather AMD put what resources they can into the Open Source development rather than trying to keep the stupid blob on the cutting edge. NVIDIA puts all of their Linux devs (like 3 of them, tops, iirc) on the proprietary blob, so it's rather natural that they manage to keep up faster (although they have still lagged a LOT many times before.... I can't count how many times I've had to reinstall older X server packages on distros when I was stuck using NVIDIA's driver).

[highlandsun]

I wonder when someone will package this for Ubuntu Intrepid; too many things still don't work on my laptop when I test the Jaunty images...

[SyXbiT]

I agree that I'd much rather a driver use proper XServer stuff (and DRI2 etc..), but at the end of the day, I just want my graphics card to run compiz and play videos at the same time..
and NOW

I don't care about gaming benchmarks. I can dual boot to windows for gaming. I care about quick support for XServers and compiz, videos, and now, hardware h264 decoding.

[Arch64]

Oh my, Ctrl+alt+backspace NOT working by default !!

These Xorg devs have no priorities ! It is outrageous.

--------

At least, the perfomance is really good.

xf86-video-ati-git here-Arch Linux x64 - with DRI2 enabled.

[kraftman]

So far as fglrx being behind... who cares? I'd rather AMD put what resources they can into the Open Source development rather than trying to keep the stupid blob on the cutting edge. NVIDIA puts all of their Linux devs (like 3 of them, tops, iirc) on the proprietary blob, so it's rather natural that they manage to keep up faster (although they have still lagged a LOT many times before.... I can't count how many times I've had to reinstall older X server packages on distros when I was stuck using NVIDIA's driver).

I completely agree. I used nvidia cards for few years and nvidia closed blob were an only reason why my Linux box crashed sometimes. I'm very happy AMD/Ati r500 card owner now. Things which has the most priority for me work perfectly - compiz, video playback, desktop is very smooth now, I can play some 3D games too. I get rid of binary and proprietary crap from my system at last.