X.Org Server 1.13 RC1 Packs In Many Changes

Written by Michael Larabel in X.Org on 10 July 2012 at 02:19 PM EDT. 11 Comments
X.ORG
After pulling in a ton of changes, the merge window for X.Org Server 1.13 is now over and the first release candidate has been issued.

X.Org Server 1.13 is planned for its official debut in early September, but available as of this morning is X.Org Server 1.12.99.901, a.k.a. 1.13 RC1.

Key features of this six-month update to the X.Org Server include:

- The removal of XAA acceleration support, which reduces the size of the X.Org Server for this old means of 2D X.Org acceleration that was succeeded years ago by EXA and now new alternatives like SNA and GLAMOR. XAA was a broken mess in recent years and rather useless so now at least the code-base is a bit more tidy thanks to Daniel Stone, plus a number of other clean-up patches submitted by him in recent days.

- PRIME DRI2 offloading support, DDX driver API changes, and many other changes by David Airlie. This is to improve GPU hybrid support, USB GPU hot-plugging, output slaves, etc.

- RandR 1.5 with provider object support as part of David's just-mentioned feature work.

- GLX_ARB_create_context support for OpenGL 3.0+ context functionality.

- A consistent coding style.

- Various input updates.

- New GLX extensions.

- There was NOT any merging of XWayland functionality for Wayland integration.

- Jeremy Huddleston of Apple has contributed many XQuartz changes for the X.Org Server on Apple OS X.

- Some changes on the behalf of Canonical... 44 changes from Chase Douglas and two changes from Christopher James Halse Rogers. But in the grand scheme of things, Intel developers continue dominating X.Org Server contributions, David Airlie and Peter Hutterer at Red Hat have done much for this release, and Daniel Stone is also still doing a lot of work. (For more data, see the recent X.Org Server development statistics.)

That covers most of the changes for X.Org Server 1.13 that end-users can expect. NVIDIA's binary Linux graphics driver will likely provide initial support for xorg-server 1.13 in the near future while the AMD Catalyst Linux driver is likely a few months out. X.Org Server 1.13 can be expected in Fedora 18, but it doesn't look like the 1.13 release will be pushed into Ubuntu 12.10.

The X.Org Server 1.13 Release Candidate 1 announcement can be found on the Xorg mailing list.
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