X.Org News Archives

The 2013 State of X.Org Report has been issued by Bart Massey on the behalf of the X.Org Foundation. There isn't too much new information out of this brief report, but they may be doing less X.Org "katamari" releases or abandon this process all together. The annual report also expresses a belief that 2013 may be the year of "Mobile Wayland."

Immediately following XDC2012 there was a lot of talk about "DRI3", but nothing materialized in time for the forthcoming X.Org Server 1.14 release. The DRI3 plans haven't died off but now Keith Packard is talking about this next Direct Rendering Infrastructure update as DRI3000.

Kernel mode-setting support for VIA's cruddy and aging graphics hardware continues to be worked on as a hobby project, but don't expect it to be merged for the Linux 3.9 kernel.

The second release candidate of X.Org Server 1.14 is now available ahead of the official release in a few weeks time.

Last weekend at FOSDEM 2013 there was an update on atomic page-flipping and mode-setting.

Aside from the real story behind Wayland and X, another Linux graphics focused presentation at LCA 2013 was by David Airlie talking about his work on RandR 1.4 / PRIME.

This year during the X.Org development track at FOSDEM 2013 were just two talks concerning Wayland. One talk covered input with the Weston reference compositor while the other covered using hardware overlays for Weston.

Donnie Berkholz presented at FOSDEM 2013 with various X.Org statistics and a look at the health of the development community. Not counting just the X.Org Server but also related components within the X.Org umbrella, the pace of development appears to be on the decline.

The Linux graphics driver stack remains currently insecure with some fundamental issues that jeopardize the Linux desktop's integrity, but improvements are still being made to address the current issues.

While xf86-video-sunxifb sounds like an old X.Org driver from the Sun Microsystems days for some obscure SPARC system, this driver is a fork of the xf86-video-mali DDX driver. What makes this ARM X.Org graphics driver interesting is that it promises better performance on the Allwinner A10/A13 SoC compared to the ARM vendor's official driver.

Aside from the load of miscellaneous X.Org package updates, VMware has released updates to their important X.Org driver components for input and graphics when it comes to Linux guests on their virtualization products.

A large set of X11/X.Org components have seen new release updates in the past few days.

The X.Org state tracker target, which allows for providing basic 2D/EXA acceleration with the X.Org Server over GPU shaders using a generic Gallium3D state tracker, is no longer supported by the R300 Gallium3D driver. Support has been eliminated and the X.Org state tracker targets for other Gallium3D drivers might also be dropped.

For those developers wishing to dive into the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) world on Linux, committed to the libdrm tree are improved man pages that cover various areas of this key component to the open-source Linux graphics stack.

There's less than a month to go until FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels, Belgium. The X@FOSDEM developers meeting of X.Org stakeholders will once again be taking place at this leading annual open-source conference for Europeans. Here's an interview with Luc Verhaegen sharing about what he'll be talking about with his Lima driver project.

The xf86-video-modesetting 0.6.0 driver has been released with support for virtual connectors and a couple of bug-fixes.

Keith Packard announced the end of new development for X.Org Server 1.14 and has tagged xorg-server 1.14 Release Candidate 1.

A complete but experimental implementation of "render nodes" for the open-source Linux graphics stack has been published. After being discussed in months prior for advancing the Linux graphics stack to take care of some security holes, this render node implementation is slowly but surely nearing a state for merging to mainline.

Three months after the release of X.Org Server 1.13, the first point release is now available to provide additional bug-fixes.

As written about last week, X Input 2.3 is being worked on for hopeful inclusion into X.Org Server 1.14.

The X.Org Server 1.14 merge window will soon be closing with this next xorg-server release being expected in March.

Peter Hutterer has published his patches for X Input 2.3, the next version of the X.Org Input extension that's likely to be merged into X.Org Server 1.14. The notable addition to X Input 2.3 is Pointer Barrier Events.

Chris Wilson is out with yet another Intel X.Org graphics driver update in the xf86-video-intel 2.20.x series.

Laurent Pinchart has submitted patches seeking comments concerning the Common Display Framework, formerly being developed as the Generic Panel Framework.

It's been several months since having anything to report on the state of VIA graphics under Linux. VIA hasn't been doing anything officially to better their Linux support and the "OpenChrome" development community is quite limited and small. While the long-in-development OpenChrome DRM driver for providing VIA kernel mode-setting support has yet to be merged into the mainline code-base, it's still being developed.

The Pixman rendering library is out with a major new release that presents several interesting new features.

After looking at Wayland's development history this weekend, uploaded today are some visualizations that reflect upon the X11 Server's development as well as Mesa.

For those wondering about the outcome of the Linux graphics driver development book that was worked on back in September prior to XDC2012, the book continues to be worked on a bit for those interested in reading it.

The X.Org Foundation has finally updated their Wiki page to reflect that they aren't only about the X Window System.

The second DRM pull request was submitted and subsequently pulled for the Linux 3.7 kernel.

Rob Clark has put out a new release of the Texas Instruments' xf86-video-omap X.Org DDX driver.

Work on integrating support for DMA-BUF to import and export buffers from the Linux kernel V4L2 stack is still a work in progress.

Keith Packard has been working on support for passing file descriptors over the X protocol socket as part of the work of DRI-Next, a.k.a. the "DRI3" undertaking.

Taking a break from his crazy activity on the Intel driver and SNA acceleration architecture, Chris Wilson released today Cairo 1.12.4. There are some worthwhile changes and new features to this release making it worth the upgrade.

Keith Packard has outlined plans for "DRI-Next", the improvements to the Direct Rendering Infrastructure that were brewed earlier this month at XDC2012 Nürnberg.

The X.Org Foundation sponsored an EVoC project for OpenCL support in Piglit.

Chad Versace of Intel talked about his Waffle implementation at XDC2012.

Here's one of the final talks from this week's XDC2012 conference. This one was discussing the future Linux OpenGL ABI and other OpenGL matters.

Improvements to the Direct Rendering Manager were proposed on Friday during XDC2012.

For those not partaking in the XDC2012 Franconian beer hike today or at Oktoberfest in Munich, here's the annual Phoronix caption contest for the X.Org Developers' Conference.

Bart Massey, an X.Org Foundation Board of Directors member and Portland State University employee, shared his opinions this week on programming languages for X applications and the web vs. the desktop.

Plans for the X.Org Server 1.14 release were laid this morning in Nürnberg, including a release date for this next feature release.

Another interesting talk at XDC2012 was the work going into XCWM, the X Composite Window Manager. This library along with an XtoQ component come out of academia and allows running X client windows as part of OS native windows on platforms like OS X, Windows, and Wayland.

Peter Hutterer has been working on more than just new X.Org input code where he's most well known for his work like MPX and Xi2, but recently at Red Hat he's been working on enhancing the testing process of the X.Org Server.

A major release of the QXL X.Org graphics driver for virtualized environments has been made available and it's packing many changes.

Aspirations towards hardware-independent accelerated X.Org graphics drivers were talked about at XDC2012.

This morning there was a talk at XDC2012 about the not often spoken of xf86-input-joystick driver for providing enhanced joystick device support on X.Org.

The X.Org Foundation is planning to continue their "Endless Vacation of Code" initiative and making improvements to this program that sponsors promising student developers to work on X.Org-related code projects.

The live video stream from XDC2012 in Germany should now be working.

If you didn't hear yesterday, DRI3 was planned out and it all came together on the fly after developers began talking of a "Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3" while enjoying beers the night prior.