X.Org Server 1.17 RC1 Released, Exciting For GLAMOR & Modesetting

Keith Packard has made available the first test release for the upcoming X.Org Server 1.17 release. This release is coming a bit late but Keith is still hoping to have xorg-server 1.17.0 ready for release at the end of the year or around early January.

Among the highlights of the X.Org Server 1.17 development over the past 3~4 months that the merge window has been open include:

- Many GLAMOR optimizations after this 2D-over-OpenGL acceleration was merged in X.Org Server 1.16. GLAMOR continues running faster and is important for running X11 applications under XWayland and is used by default for the RadeonSI driver with AMD HD 7000 series GPUs and newer and on the Nouveau side for Maxwell GPUs and newer. On the Intel side when running an X.Org Server it's just an optional acceleration method for their DDX.

- The other big ticket item with X.Org Server 1.17 is integrating the xf86-video-modesetting driver. This generic DDX driver is now part of the X.Org Server that works with any DRM/KMS driver, at least in theory. The generic modesetting driver was imported and cleaned up. Eric Anholt has been adding features like GLAMOR support to the driver and DRI2 support for using underlying GPU hardware acceleration while relying on this universal DDX. Eric is planning to use xf86-video-modesetting by default for the Broadcom VC4 open-source graphics driver that's designed around the Raspberry Pi.

- Adam Jackson has been stripping out thousands and thousands of lines of unneeded/broken code.

Those are the main items to be found with the X.Org Server 1.17 release. There's also, of course, bug fixes and other minor improvements.

With X.Org Server 1.17 Release Candidate 1 now out, feature work is over for the 1.17 cycle with the rest of the time through the end of November just being for non-critical bug fixing. The month of December will be devoted just to critical bug fixes. Keith's full xorg-server 1.16.99.901 announcement can be found on the mailing list.