Mesa 7.12, Linux 3.2 Likely For Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa 7.12, Linux 3.2 Likely For Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Yesterday at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Canonical employees and others tried to hash out the general requirements for the X.Org stack to be found in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS...

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

[crispy]

Good thing to see some wayland. Since they plan to have extra long LTS releases from now on (right?) there might happen a thing or two with wayland that will be interesting to have in that release.

[plonoma]

Nice progress!

And this bit is of very large significant of how drivers should be made:

There's still some items to be figured out with this new LTS management, such as how to let the user upgrade their X/Mesa stack in Ubuntu 12.04 but might not want to move to a newer kernel, or restrict all drivers from being upgraded if they are concerned about regressions, etc. This will hopefully be figured out in other UDS-P Orlando sessions this week.

This is why graphics drivers should be written to be able to work with multiple versions of X.
A no brainer really and strange some people in the community don't get/realize that.

[rohcQaH]

A no brainer really

I agree that no brain has been utilized in the production of your statement.

Nobody denies that LTS distros have a certain desire for driver releases that are still compatible with XFree86 1.0, but creating those would come at a cost, both in additional work, in slower technical advancement and in additional technical limitations which all rolling distributions would have to suffer. The whole debate is very complex, and trying to boil it down to a single statement is plain stupid.

[werfu]

Updates During The LTS Cycle - With Ubuntu 12.04 LTS being supported on the desktop now for five years, Canonical is more worried about enabling new hardware support after the April release. What the plan is now is to backport new kernels and the X/Mesa stack to 12.04. In the Ubuntu X world, what they are looking at doing is simply rebuilding the latest Mesa/X packages of new Ubuntu releases and drop that into the Precise repository in time for the LTS point releases. In other words, the stack of Ubuntu 12.10 would be rebuilt and dropped into the 12.04 repository, 13.04 packages would be rebuilt and pushed back into 12.04, etc.

So they'll be rolling new X/Mesa/Kernel into the LTS. I wonder what's the point in doing a fixed release when this is a partial proof that rolling release could be done safely and with stability. I guess what is holding them back is the problem in upgrading the tool chain and that handling big change (like Unity) deployment would be a PITA. I do think however that could be solved by evolving the APT system. There's already meta package, but it only relies on dumb dependencies and conflit management. We need to figure out a more solid way to handle big blocks (like toolchains) change and be able to do smooth transition (and rollback in case of failure).

[kraftman]

So they'll be rolling new X/Mesa/Kernel into the LTS. I wonder what's the point in doing a fixed release when this is a partial proof that rolling release could be done safely and with stability. I guess what is holding them back is the problem in upgrading the tool chain and that handling big change (like Unity) deployment would be a PITA. I do think however that could be solved by evolving the APT system. There's already meta package, but it only relies on dumb dependencies and conflit management. We need to figure out a more solid way to handle big blocks (like toolchains) change and be able to do smooth transition (and rollback in case of failure).

Ubuntu as a rolling release would be something great. However, if that's not achievable from some reasons at least not core related software should be updated.

[plonoma]

I agree that no brain has been utilized in the production of your statement.

Nobody denies that LTS distros have a certain desire for driver releases that are still compatible with XFree86 1.0, but creating those would come at a cost, both in additional work, in slower technical advancement and in additional technical limitations which all rolling distributions would have to suffer. The whole debate is very complex, and trying to boil it down to a single statement is plain stupid.

That is NOT wat I mean.

Drivers rely heavily on a few other components. e.g. the x server, DRI and a few other things.

I'm saying that making drivers that can handle a range of x server versions, DRI and the few oter things is a good way of doing things. The things that can be different from distro to distro (or different versions of the same distro).
Having some flexibility helps for doing rolling releases.

[Kamikaze]

Phoronix: Mesa 7.12, Linux 3.2 Likely For Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

However, they are reserving the right to potentially still rely upon Mesa 7.11 if the 7.12/8.0 release is very late or not up to their expectations. This would be a huge bloody loss if 7.11 is still in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

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

Been hanging out with Aussie's lately Michael?

[FireBurn]

I thought it was tourettes

[smitty3268]

British came to mind first here.