David Airlie has announced new work on the xf86-video-modesetting driver, which aims to be a generic X.Org (DDX) driver that will take advantage of the generic parts of the Linux KMS (kernel mode-setting) APIs so that any GPU should be supported.
X.Org News Archives
1,201 X.Org open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
Glamor, an open-source project that up until now has received little community attention or public acknowledgement outside of its small development group, has now been called to be merged into the X.Org Server. But what is Glamor?
Jeremy Huddleston released xorg-server 1.11.1 a few hours ago. This release was done since two "brown-bag" issues were found in X.Org Server 1.11.0, which was released just one month ago.
It's your last chance to participate in the 2011 Linux Graphics Survey.
One of the mailing list threads I've been trying to catch up on this week while at Oktoberfest is the heated discussion about merging video/input drivers back into the X.Org Servers. This discussion was started at the XDC2011 conference, but there's many e-mails being exchanged from more parties not in favor of merging the drivers into the xorg-server tree or wishing to see other developmental process changes.
Texas Instruments has proposed a new low-level display framework for Linux.
The debate that started back up again this week at XDC2011 Chicago about merging drivers back into the X.Org Server has now moved online. Jesse Barnes has published the pros / cons that were mentioned at the X.Org Developers' Conference this week to the X.Org development mailing list for developers to now debate the idea online. This has been a hotly disputed matter for the past two years.
Ending XDC2011 Chicago on Wednesday afternoon was a discussion led by Apple's Jeremy Huddleston, Intel's Keith Packard, and Oracle's Alan Coopersmith. The discussion was about X.Org Server release schedules. The two main points brought up is merging the drivers back into the X.Org Server tree as well as aiming for a regression-free X.Org Server by reverting any commits to the server Git tree that are regressions that aren't fixed within one week's time.
For those not in Chicago for the 2011 X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC2011), here are a few photos from the Phoronix beer event yesterday. The full photo-set of XDC2011 will be published on Phoronix in the next few days, but here's a few highlights aside from the ones published already.
On Monday at XDC2011, Jamey Sharp talked about what he sees as "the codebase of the future" for X.Org and was an open discussion with the three dozen other developers at the Chicago event.
Here's some photographs from the first day of XDC2011, the annual X.Org Developers' Conference, which this year is taking place in Chicago, United States. XDC2011 is running through Wednesday and is being hosted at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
The 2011 X.Org Developers' Conference is set to begin tomorrow morning in Chicago, Illinois, United States. This three-day event will focus on what's coming down the pipe for the X.Org Server, Mesa, the Linux kernel DRM, and related areas of open-source graphics and input.
Next Tuesday during XDC2011 Chicago at the Illinois Institute of Technology I am hosting a panel about contributing to Linux and open-source projects, in particular, X.Org, Mesa, and the Linux kernel, but the information should be largely relevant to any free software project. This discussion panel is largely targeted towards university students and others that aren't yet contributing to upstream projects, with most of the panel participants having begun their Linux contributions prior to graduating from university and then most of them being poached by major open-source companies.
One of the features part of the new X Input extension to be included in X.Org Server 1.12 is smooth scrolling support.
Next week at XDC2011 Chicago there will be a rather unique discussion taking place that's quite different from what normally goes on at this annual X.Org Developers' Conference. There is going to be a moderated panel discussion (tentatively titled "Contributing to X.Org and Open-Source") about contributing to X.Org, the Linux kernel, Mesa, and open-source software in general. For those not residents of the Chicago area, this session will be broadcast on the Internet.
As a reminder to those that haven't yet participated, the 2011 Linux Graphics Survey is currently taking place and your feedback is requested to help X.Org / Linux graphics developers understand the current driver market-share and to help the desktop community at large.
While there has been an X.Org multi-touch implementation for X Input 2.1 dating back about a year, there's still no formal X Input 2.1 release (X Input 2.0 came in 2009). When X Input 2.1 is released, likely as part of X.Org Server 1.12, it won't even offer up the multi-touch support. Here's some of what you can expect to see from X Input 2.1 and then the X Input 2.2 milestone.
X.Org Server 1.11 was officially released this Friday evening.
X.Org Server 1.11 was originally planned for release on the 19th of August, but following a one-week delay, it should be officially released this Friday. This is another significant update to the X.Org Server.
Three weeks from today, the X.Org Developers' Conference, the annual meet-up of Linux graphics driver developers, will be taking place in Chicago. Here's the latest developments for this conference.
Rob Clark of Texas Instruments has proposed to X.Org developers that the DRI2 protocol be extended so that overlays can display video content, as a possible replacement to X-Video or for a client-side X-Video API on top of DRI2.
We're now just one month away from the 2011 X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC2011) that's being hosted in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
Keith Packard has tagged X.Org Server 1.11 RC2. The X.Org Server 1.11 release is imminent and the RC2 marks the end of development except for critical fixes.
One of the long sought after features of X.Org and the Linux graphics stack has been the ability to run multiple X Servers from a single graphics card. While this wouldn't be used by many, there are still many interested in seeing this feature request become a reality.
Lennart Poettering has published patches this Sunday to provide support for udev/systemd multi-seat input device hot-plugging support for the X.Org Server.
As I mentioned earlier this week on the X.Org mailing lists, there's just two months left until XDC2011, this year's X.Org Developers' Conference that I've been organizing. XDC2011 is taking place from the 12th to 14th of September in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
While the Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau DRM drivers are now mature with kernel mode-setting -- and the Intel Poulsbo KMS driver is even getting ready to leave the staging area -- there's still one fairly common name missing from the desktop Linux KMS scene: VIA Technologies. While VIA defenestrated their open-source efforts and completely blew their TODO list, James Simmons, an independent developer, has basically been the community VIA development source.
For anyone still relying upon non-kernel non-evdev non-synaptics input drivers for X.Org on Linux, there's a number of new releases. Peter Hutterer has released six updated xf86-input drivers.
Corentin Chary has announced the release of XWayland and the new xf86-video-wlshm driver.
James Simmons has written a status update to the OpenChrome development list concerning his ongoing work towards enabling kernel mode-setting (KMS) support for VIA hardware with this community-maintained VIA Linux project.
Last week there was the release of a set of patches for X.Org that implement smooth-scrolling support for the X Server. These patches were released by Daniel Stone and today he's now released a set of patches that target the X.Org Synaptics input driver for implementing smooth scrolling, predictable motion, and better acceleration.
In the KMS (kernel mode-setting) world there is not only news today to report on a new open-source Freescale KMS driver, but on the state of VIA's kernel mode-setting driver. VIA Technologies may have killed off their open-source strategy, but for the past number of months there's been a developer writing a VIA KMS/TTM DRM driver that would work with the OpenChrome user-space X.Org driver.
In early 2012 we can expect to see the release of X.Org Server 1.12 with various touch improvements and other input related work. Also being queued up for the 1.12 release is support for smooth scrolling.
Just returning back from a brief holiday, Keith Packard has tagged X.Org Server 1.11 Release Candidate 1.
Apple's Jeremy Huddleston has just released X.Org Server 1.10.2. This second point release was set to be released yesterday, but then there was fear of a regression causing a delay (turns out it's no longer reproducible), so now we have a holiday weekend release of xorg-server 1.10.2.
Even with the likely release of the Linux 3.0 kernel, open-source graphics drivers continue to be a big problem for the Linux desktop. While they have improved a lot in recent years, for many Linux users they can cause horrific headaches. Recently it was mentioned on Phoronix that Intel Sandy Bridge is in bad shape for Ubuntu 11.04 and that it even broke upstream in Linux 2.6.39, but Intel's far from being the only driver experiencing a choppy boat ride.
While not exactly uncommon for a major X.Org Server update, the video driver ABI for the DDX drivers will break with the forthcoming xorg-server 1.11 release. This means that for those using the proprietary graphics drivers, namely the AMD Catalyst driver, you may be stuck waiting a couple of months for support.
X Input 2.1 was originally talked about for X.Org Server 1.10 with its initial multi-touch implementation having been published back in late 2010.
Here's the next chapter of the X.Org / Mesa plans for Ubuntu 11.10, in continuation of the earlier X.Org / Mesa talks at UDS Budapest.
Announced just hours ago on the X.Org development mailing list is recent work to create the xf86-video-nested driver. As implied by the name of the driver and the title of this news post, this is an X.Org video driver designed to run nested X.Org servers. In other words, X.Org on top of X.Org.
As I just announced to the X.Org mailing lists (I'm the organizer of this year's event), the 2011 X.Org Developers' Conference is taking place in Chicago, Illinois from the 12 to 15th of September.
Jeremy Huddleston has tagged the first point release in the X.Org Server 1.10 series.
Patches have been presented on the X.Org development mailing list that provide a number of fixes and improvements to the ill-loved xf86-video-sis, the SiS X.Org driver.
While student registration for this year's Google of Summer of Code (GSoC) has not yet commenced, it's looking quite hopeful for the X.Org / Mesa work this summer. There was an OpenGL 4.1 state tracker that was proposed and some developers are calling this too ambitious. Just days ago there was then a multi-GPU PRIME and hot-switching proposal. This though is not the end of the list.
Last week a student developer from Belgium had proposed an OpenGL 4.1 state tracker for Gallium3D to be developed this summer as part of the X.Org / Mesa involvement with the annual Google Summer of Code. Under this proposal, OpenGL 4.1 would be implemented from scratch (Mesa / Gallium3D are currently only supportive of OpenGL 2.1 with limited support for OpenGL 3.0 extensions) without any dependence on Mesa; some of the well-known Mesa developers called this too ambitious, but it's unclear if the Belgian developer will still attempt this workload. Meanwhile, a Russian student developer has just voiced two ambitious proposals: Multi-GPU PRIME support and GPU hot-switching.
Summer is quickly approaching in the northern hemisphere so that means it's time for yet another year of Google's Summer of Code. Once again, X.Org / Mesa should be participating, so it's now time to submit ideas for areas where potential student developers could focus their summer work. Here's a few of the possibilities.
The xf86-video-chrome driver, which is the open-source VIA Linux X.Org driver from the One Laptop Per Child project, now says their driver is "stable" after fixing up some rendering bugs.
Besides laying out the plans for releasing X.Org Server 1.11 in August, Keith Packard has restarted the discussion surrounding RandR 1.4 so that it will hopefully be readied for integration into this next X Server release. It was part of X.Org Server 1.10 until the last minute when it was pulled from the server and caused a last minute video ABI break.
While the group behind the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) child ended up writing their own VIA Linux graphics driver, which is further fragmenting VIA's nasty Linux situation, James Simmons now has his OpenChrome-based VIA DRM kernel mode-setting driver working from the OLPC hardware.
It seems as if the X.Org project has finally formed a habit of wanting to release on time. In years past, even point releases have been more than 200 days late and there hasn't been much to their release schedules that were actually executed on time. It's something I had long pointed out and have received jabs back in turn, but the past few X.Org Server releases have been tagged on time, plus or minus a few days. It looks like X.Org Server 1.11 may be another on-time release, it's at least being planned right out of the starting gate.
1201 X.Org news articles published on Phoronix.