The Tiny X Server Fork Is Still Being Maintained

The tinyx fork of the X.Org Server back from version 1.2.0 with Xvesa support and replaces XFree86 era code in some lightweight Linux distributions like Tiny Core Linux and Puppy. One of the developers has commented on the recent X Server security vulnerability that remained unresolved for more than two decades.

The tinyx fork isn't to be confused with the TinyX/KDrive fork of the server from the past but is unrelated. The X.Org Server 1.2.0 fork is updated to work in a modern Linux environment and strips away all unnecessary code for its users. There's also tweaks for a faster X Server start-up time and other tweaks. The tinyx 32-bit binaries can be about 500kb in size.

The reason for mentioning tinyx today is that one of the involved developers has chimed in on the latest 23-year old X Server security vulnerability that was disclosed a few days ago.

The Phoronix reader and tinyx maintainer that back-ports these security fixes into their forked code-based "Ibidem", made several observations in the forums that might be of interest to those who have never dived into the X Server code themselves.

This independent developer noted that the upstream X.Org Server has a lot more of the code is unchanged in years than he would have expected, backporting of fixes to older X Servers is frequently trivial, and it's fairly quick in backporting fixes despite X's old reputation.

Ibidem also noted, "when I read [the X Server code] I'm not surprised by the number of bugs or the static nature of the code. It seems to be most fun when you have a little bit of a masochistic streak..."