X.Org News Archives

As reported previously on Phoronix, X.Org/Mesa/Wayland is no longer involved with Google's Summer of Code. Some changes have also been made concerning the project's independent Endless Vacation of Code.

The DRM render-nodes work has been revived. This DRM branch originally started out when working on support for enabling two X.Org Servers to run off of a single graphics card.

X.Org developers are currently discussing the possibility to remove the KDrive, Xnest, and Xvfb technologies from the X.Org Server, citing that their functionality has been superseded by better alternatives and this could lead to trimming the xorg-server by over 30,000 lines of code.

Hitting the X.Org Server Git repository on Wednesday was an extremely large patch: 259,934 lines of code were removed with 264,651 lines of code being added, but don't get too excited.

Well, here's a surprise, Google has decided to not accept the X.Org Foundation into participating in this year's Google Summer of Code. Any students interested in contributing to X.Org / Mesa / Wayland over the summer will not be part of Google's annual arrangement.

Members of the X.Org Foundation have elected new members to their board of directors to oversee this project that's critical to the Linux desktop.

Following last weeks release of the new X.Org EvDev input driver that introduces support for multi-touch and smooth scrolling, the updated Synaptics input driver is now available for Linux users. Key features, of course, are multi-touch and ClickPads support.

Some new details have emerged concerning the 2012 X.Org Developers' Summit, which will take place this September and commemorate 25 years of X11.

Following the release of X.Org Server 1.12 earlier in the week, the evdev input driver has been updated and released. The two big features for this common input X.Org driver is to take advantage of multi-touch and smooth scrolling, which is now supported by the latest X Input extension updates.

Here's a video by James Simmons, the community developer that's near single-handedly been working on providing VIA kernel mode-setting (KMS) support and in-kernel memory management (via a GEM-ified TTM implementation), talking about the Linux KMS and GEM/TTM infrastructures for those wishing to learn more about Linux graphics driver programming.

Earlier today was the first round of comments by David Airlie regarding the finishing and up-streaming of his X.Org GPU hot-plugging support. This allows for new GPUs to be dynamically added to a running X.Org Server environment.

An X Server written against the X11 protocol in Java has been made available for Google's Android platform.

X.Org Server 1.12 is now officially available with X Input 2.2, which is the X Input extension update that formally introduces multi-touch support.

From Monday through next week, X.Org members are able to vote for their choice of candidates to be seated on the X.Org Board of Directors.

Besides X Input 2.2 multi-touch, within the X.Org / Linux input world, one of the recent patch-sets going through several revisions with comments has been for introducing ClickPad support in the Synaptics driver.

It looks like X Input 2.2 with proper multi-touch support is ready to be shipped in the soon-to-be-released X.Org Server 1.12.

One week after the release of the new X.Org mode-setting driver there's another release with more changes.

Remember the proof of concept PRIME multi-GPU rendering / GPU offloading work that was being hacked on two years ago? Work on it has been resurrected and could make it into the kernel when the VGEM driver is ready.

Last week a status update was issued concerning the plans for OpenChrome kernel mode-setting (KMS) support for VIA hardware under Linux. There's finally a goal set for a release this summer.

The xf86-video-openchrome driver has seen its first proper release in quite a while. The xf86-video-openchrome 0.2.905 release has support for new hardware and features.

Keith Packard talked last weekend at FOSDEM about the imminent X.Org Server 1.12, the succeeding X.Org Server 1.13 release, and plans for bridging the X-to-Wayland migration.

X.Org Server 1.12, which will be officially released in March, is looking good when it comes to proper multi-touch support as exposed via X Input 2.2.

Keith Packard released X.Org Server 1.12 RC2 in time for weekend testing. At the same time, Apple's Jeremy Huddleston released the X.Org Server 1.11.4 stable version.

Now that X Input 2.2 with Multi-Touch is merged into X.Org Server 1.12, which will be released by early March, it's time for the tool-kit and application developers to take advantage of the support. It looks like GNOME will be on the ball this time around with GTK+ 3.4 looking to handle multi-touch.

The XAA 2D acceleration architecture is finally set to be stripped out of X.Org Server 1.13 and upstream open-source X.Org drivers.

The X.Org Foundation has been quietly paying a developer to better the OpenCL support within Gallium3D.

Keith Packard released the X.Org Server 1.12 release candidate last night. This marks the close of the merge window for the xorg-server 1.12 cycle as the final release is prepared for availability in March.

Ian Romanick has published his patch-set for the necessary X.Org Server changes to support the GLX_ARB_create_context for OpenGL 3.0. Keith Packard has also announced the X.Org Server 1.12 merge window will close on Christmas.

Yesterday when writing about VIA Technologies preparing a new graphics open-source push, it made me curious where the S3 Graphics Linux driver is at today.

There was a new documentation drop this week that consisted of data-sheets and other programming documentation for the 2D, 3D, and MPEG engines of a mobile GPU.

While the X Input 2.2 / Multi-Touch code was merged into X.Org Server 1.12 today, still missing is RandR 1.4 support as sought after by NVIDIA driver users, among other Linux desktop users.

David Airlie has achieved a bit more success in his GPU "PRIME" work to provide graphics processor hot-plugging support under Linux with the X.Org Server.

Here's a very unexpected but welcoming surprise for the holidays: there's some source code that's about to be released by VIA Technologies.

Peter Hutterer has supplied some detailed information about the new X.Org multi-touch support as supplied by X Input 2.2 and to be found in X.Org Server 1.12. This information concerns pointer emulation and getting the new input events.

One month has passed since the first X.Org Server 1.12 snapshot was released, but now a new development version has landed.

X.Org Server 1.11.3 was released by Apple's Jeremy Huddleston prior to starting the weekend.

Multi-touch support is finally ready for the X.Org world! Peter Hutterer has submitted the patches for X.Org Server 1.12 that deliver on multi-touch support with the X Input 2.2 extension.

As talked about a few weeks ago, the release schedule of X.Org Server 1.12 has changed, except not for technical reasons and only to workaround Keith Packard's holiday. Rather than releasing in February, it's now been decided to release in March and to include X Input 2.2 with Multi-Touch support. The X.Org 7.7 Katamari is also being cooked up for March.

The X.Org Board of Directors has decided this afternoon the location of the 2012 X.Org Developers' Summit. Proposals were submitted for Dublin and Nürnberg, but in the end the board elected to go with the Bavarian location.

Peter Hutterer has provided an update on the state of X.Org multi-touch support as he hopes to have this input feature ready for integration into the next X.Org Server release.

X Input 2.2 will likely be merged into X.Org Server 1.12.

The discussion surrounding Virtual CRTCs has been renewed.

The first development snapshot of X.Org Server 1.12 is now available for interested testers.

There's a new project to replace the XQuartz DDX, as used by Apple Mac OS X, with the stock XFree86 DDX using a dummy video driver.

The plan is for Glamor, an OpenGL-based acceleration method for X.Org drivers and common driver, to ship as a Glamor rendering library and a Glamor EGL support library.

For any unfortunate Linux souls still stuck with VIA hardware, here's a status update about the OpenChrome driver project for providing an open-source graphics driver for VIA integrated graphics processors.

The second point release of X.Org Server 1.11 is now available.

If you're interested in multi-GPU rendering, capabilities for DisplayLink-like devices, or NVIDIA Optimus / MUX-less hybrid graphics switching, here's some news worth reading about virtual CRTCs.

David Airlie has demonstrated success in the first phase of his X.Org GPU/driver hot-plugging work, which eventually may lead to proper dynamic GPU switching under X.

While it's likely in the next two to three years that the Wayland Display Server will play a pivotal role on the Linux desktop, the X11 Server isn't going away immediately. There's still legacy X applications that must run, uncertainty about what Solaris/BSD will do for their display server due to their graphics driver shortcomings, and other uncharted issues. It's possible that X12, an improved version of the X11 protocol, could even be developed.