AMD's Catalyst Linux Driver Preparing For A World Without An X Server?
While there's no announcement out of AMD indicating any future support directions for their Catalyst Linux driver, it seems their Catalyst driver will soon be equipped with an option for building the driver packages without X.Org Server support, a.k.a. no building of the fglrx DDX driver.
The distribution-specific packaging scripts for the Catalyst Linux driver continue to be hosted on Phorogit and recent activity indicate they're being prepped for a --NoXServer option. The --NoXServer option was added today to the Ubuntu packaging script (separately today, also support for the Ubuntu 14.10 "Utopic Unicorn" release).
Earlier this month the SUSE packaging script was also updated for the --NoXServer flag. The SUSE packaging is no longer a monolithic RPM but was split into fglrx-core, fglrx-graphics, fglrx-amdcccle, and fglrx-opencl packages with the "No X Server" flag leading to fglrx-core just being built. The other distribution packaging scripts bundled within the Catalyst Linux driver and hosted on Phorogit have yet to be updated.
Whether AMD is just trying to better modularize their driver for headless compute/GPGPU systems, is working towards a more open driver strategy with Catalyst mostly being bound to user-space (though I haven't been told of any updates on this matter since the original information), is pursuing Wayland or Mir support where there would be no need for the X Server DDX, or is working towards other changes remain to be known. We'll hopefully see in the months ahead at least when these updated packaging scripts are incorporated into a public Catalyst Linux driver release.
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