X.Org 7.5 Released. Wait, Nope!

[GreatWalrus]

Very sad and scary to me the appearance of X.org development lately. I hope things will turn around also. Great article, Michael - I hope it opens some eyes out there.

[hubick]

I just want to say how much I appreciate the contributions of those who *are* working on X.org (individuals, Intel, RedHat, etc). Slow development is better than no development at all. Given the difficulty of even casual X hacking, we are lucky to have a team with the knowledge to refactor and improve the core API's.

Companies looking to contribute could examine what tasks new contributors could take over from the core team, freeing them up to concentrate on major architectural issues.

[puelocesar]

1. XOrg is far more than graphics
2. Could you explain how Quartz is so much different compared to XRender?

I have to agree about the quite ugly code-base, I don't want to predict how a re-write would look like once its has all the features people *depend* on.

- Clemens

Hi Clemens, I cited Quartz, because when I installed Hackintosh on my machine, it used the Vesa driver, and it was no hw acceleration, but desktop and effects were way faster, smoother and stable then all my linux boxes using official drivers on them (intel and nvidia).

About rewrites, I'm a commercial software developer, and every time I have to work on ancient and bugged code, I always notice that it would be much more faster to just throw off the old codebase and write a new one then adapting an archaic, ugly and unmaintainable codebase. But obviously, our projects are *much* smaller then X, so I don't know if that applies..

[mattst88]

No, KMS only moves the mode-setting part of the driver into the kernel. Mode setting is usually a very rare event, and has nothing to do with 2D/3D performance.
GEM moves memory management into kernel, but the whole 2D accaleration code is still running (mostly) in userspace.

After all, why should it make a difference if the driver is running in userspace or kernel?
The main problems of bad 2D performance are elsewhere...

- Clemens

The current acceleration architecture, EXA, is only a stop-gap. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXA

The long term plan is to move everything to OpenGL. Through Gallium3D, I assume. That is to say, 2D acceleration will be no more; only 3D will exist, with 2D done through 3D rendering.

[curaga]

The article was very true, and I like how it was serious at a date like today. I applaud Phoronix

[portets43]

@Michael

What about an interview with Kristian on Wayland and stuff ???

That would be great

[russofris]

The only current alternative to Xorg is Xfree.. You need to trust me when I state that we're using the better of the two.

Xorg needs developers and architects.

[RealNC]

I suppose the point was to move away from "X" (as in "The X Window System") in general to something else. The core of X is not needed today at all. It's there for the same reasons DOS is still there on Windows :P

[hax0r]

I heard Linus switched to subversion!

[BlackStar]

I suppose the point was to move away from "X" (as in "The X Window System") in general to something else. The core of X is not needed today at all. It's there for the same reasons DOS is still there on Windows :P

Many have tried to replace X. Until now, all have failed.

I dislike X, but mostly for its insane low-level API. Despite its shortcomings, it's versatile, stable and proven (in the API sense).

I don't believe a complete rewrite is feasible at this point in time (if it was, someone would have done it). IMHO, they way forward is to strip functionality from X11, bit by bit:

KMS is a great first step. I would also like to see input handling moved to the kernel (the kernel APIs are way more sane here!) I don't actually think that will happen (even with XInput2 looking dead in the water), but it would remove a large burden from the Xorg developers. Finally, I would like to see a controlled deprecation and rewrite of the worse and/or duplicated parts of the API.

I don't expect that will ever happen, so I've done what every sane person dealing with X11 does: write (or use) an abstraction layer so you don't have to look at its API anymore

Edit
Question: what is the point of XRender when we have OpenGL? No, really, why not simply design a render and compositing API that uses OpenGL underneath? Is there really something that XRender can do that cannot be done directly or indirectly with OpenGL?