X.Org News Archives

Tiago Vignatti has put out some statistics on the contributions to X.Org development during the X.Org Server 1.10 development cycle, to the xorg-server itself as well as the open-source drivers.

Last August we reported that Apple's lead X.Org engineer, Jeremy Huddleston, had stepped up to take over stable release management of the X.Org Server 1.9 series. The assumption was that Apple was planning to make X.Org Server 1.9.x available within their forthcoming Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" operating system rather than the old X.Org Server 1.4 found with Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard". After trying out the latest Mac OS X 10.7 build, this is indeed the case.

X.Org Server 1.10 RC3 was barely out for 24 hours, but X.Org Server 1.10 was officially released on Friday evening by Keith Packard.

Only a few days have passed since the release of X.Org Server 1.10 RC2, but another release candidate has now arrived. Given the short turnaround time since the previous release candidate and now being days away from the final release, it's a mundane release candidate, right? Actually, no. RandR 1.4 was just pulled in its entirety from xorg-server 1.10, which also caused the server's video ABI to now be bumped again.

Keith Packard has just announced the release of the X.Org Server 1.10 release candidate. "RC2 has all of the reviewed fixes merged in. The only fixes I've got pending at this point are some RandR DIX fixes that haven't been reviewed yet. Other than that, I think we're pretty much ready for the 1.10 release. Let me know if you've got pending fixes that you want to see merged in 1.10."

To all registered X.Org members, the 2011 elections are beginning next week for replacing four board member seats this year. The elections will end on the 28th of February for selecting four of six members.

One of the seldom mentioned X.Org DDX drivers is xf86-video-v4l. This driver is not for some obscure or vintage hardware like many other drivers in the X.Org tree (e.g. -savage, -s3virge, -tseng, -trident) but it targets no specific graphics card and instead provides an X-Video extension port for video overlay. Just load the module and it works with any hardware supported by a Video 4 Linux (V4L) driver. While this driver isn't often worked on (the most recent commits in Git are from July), it's in the process of being revised.

Before ending out last week, Jeremy Huddleston released X.Org Server 1.9.4. At least one more release, X.Org Server 1.9.5, is also expected before this branch is retired in favor of X Server 1.10, which will be released in the coming weeks.

VIA's small Linux development community is badly fragmented; there is yet another group of developers creating their own VIA driver. I wish it was a joke, seeing as there are already a number of drivers for the same VIA chipsets and none of them are feature complete or in really great condition, but a new driver has been released. This time the new driver comes from the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) crew and it's just being dubbed xf86-video-chrome. Not only though is there yet another X.Org driver, but it's bringing its own kernel DRM.

Thanks to James Simmons, an independent developer in the open-source community, last month a patch was published that adds TTM/GEM memory management support to the VIA DRM Linux kernel driver. This was after VIA basically admitted defeat for their Linux / open-source strategy. Over the weekend the second version of this TTM/GEM patch was published by James.

The videos from this year's Linux.Conf.Au conference are now available online. There were a few graphics talks by Keith Packard, Eric Anholt, and Adam Jackson, which can be found embedded below.

For those following closely the development of Ubuntu 11.04, in the process of going into the Ubuntu Natty repository this week is its new X stack. This means the latest snapshot of the unreleased X Server 1.10 and Mesa 7.10 for the open-source DRI / Gallium3D drivers. Due to the usual API/ABI breaks, this also means updated X.Org drivers are also going into the "Natty Narwhal" repository at the same time.

Soren Sandmann Pedersen has announced the release of the xf86-video-qxl 0.0.13 driver. The QXL X.Org driver isn't commonly talked about at Phoronix like the ATI/AMD, Intel, and Nouveau Linux drivers, but this is the driver used for the QEMU para-virtualized guests with the QXL Virtual GPU that is found in SPICE, the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization System. This driver brings some semi-interesting changes.

This entry on the X.Org Wiki isn't brand new, but for those that have yet to see it, there is a development guide to how graphics cards work on this Wiki page. There was just a trivial update to the guide today and I had then realized it hasn't been mentioned before on Phoronix.

The October release of Pixman 0.20 brought performance improvements, particularly when using this pixel manipulation library for X and Cairo under ARM platforms. A month later there were more ARM optimizations in the first development snapshot for Pixman 0.22. The second development snapshot for Pixman 0.22 has arrived this morning, and guess what? It brings more ARM performance improvements.

Just one month ago an independent developer began working on VIA TTM/GEM support for the VIA kernel DRM driver along with VIA kernel mode-setting support, even while VIA's open-source Linux strategy is dead. Just a few weeks later, James Simmons' VIA TTM/GEM memory management patches are now ready.

While VIA defenestrated its open-source Linux graphics driver strategy, there has been some recent work under-way on providing a GEM/TTM + KMS driver for VIA's integrated graphics processors by the community. In particular, this work is being done by James Simmons, the former Google Summer of Code student developer who was working on 3Dfx kernel mode-setting support a few months back.

For those that were hoping that VIA Technologies would pull through in providing their open-source graphics driver support like they had promised with kernel mode-setting, a Gallium3D driver, and being Linux friendly, kiss those thoughts goodbye as they've been basically thrown out the window. Sadly, it's not happening. I had a very productive conversation with VIA's Stewart Haston, who is their international marketing specialist, and their Linux outlook is extremely dark.

While VIA isn't working on their Linux graphics support, they are continuing to design new hardware. For the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, VIA Technologies has just released their Nano X2 Dual-Core CPU.

At the end of December we reported on the 3Dfx KMS Linux developer working on VIA code to provide kernel mode-setting support for VIA's IGPs in the Linux kernel and thus TTM/GEM memory management support too. This is after VIA had promised to deliver this support (along with Gallium3D support) in 2010, but failed miserably. This code though is now moving along but without any support for VIA.

Earlier this month we reported that the X.Org multi-touch work was nearing completion and now this work is getting even more readied for X.Org Server 1.11 once its merge window opens in February. Daniel Stone has today put out a fourth version of these X patches that provide proper multi-touch support to Linux and other operating systems running X.Org.

With VIA not really doing anything for open-source and Linux as all of their efforts seemed to have stalled, the small open-source development community centered around VIA has become quite fragmented as we have talked about multiple times now. There's multiple X.Org drivers for VIA, with not a single one clearly dominating or being feature-complete and well maintained, while other areas like the DRM/KMS and Mesa/Gallium3D support are just in shambles.

The past few days I've been wondering whether or not X.Org 7.6 would make it out in 2010 or not. After all, this X.Org katamari update was supposed to be here in August after X.Org 7.5 was released in October of 2009 and the 7.6 release was delayed to November. The release of X.Org 7.6 didn't come in November, but there was one release candidate but not much information since. This afternoon, however, Alan Coopersmith has announced the final release.

One year ago VIA came out with their Linux TODO list, which was disappointing. This list had a VIA TTM/GEM memory manager module for Q2'2010, a kernel mode-setting driver in the works for H2'2010, and a Gallium3D driver in-development for Q4'2010. Even meeting this TODO list would be bad as the support most Linux customers are after (3D and KMS to a lesser extent) would not be arriving until three years after VIA announced this newest Linux strategy. But, VIA has failed miserably in accomplishing any of these mile-stones for KMS and open-source 3D acceleration support. Though resulting in VIA's Linux community being fragmented even more, new VIA X.Org (DDX) drivers seem to keep popping up. If there wasn't already enough of these not-fully-working and rarely-touched open-source drivers, another VIA Chrome X.Org driver has been started recently that's a fork of another open-source VIA driver.

For X.Org Server 1.11, to be released likely in late summer of 2011, there will be proper multi-touch support. For quite a while now there's been work under-way largely by Daniel Stone and then more recently by Canonical. A few weeks back Daniel Stone returned to the multi-touch party to get X Input 2.1 with multi-touch support beaten into shape. It's now nearly ready.

Coming just as anticipated, Apple's Jeremy Huddleston has announced the release of X.Org Server 1.9.3. This is the third maintenance release in the 1.9 series, which was originally introduced in August.

Following the hiatus last week with the X.Org Server 1.10 merge window being kept open to allow time for finishing up RandR 1.4 with per-CRTC pixmaps and then NVIDIA pushing for fence sync support in this release, the work has now settled and the merge window has closed. Keith Packard has also announced the first development snapshot of X.Org Server 1.10.

While version 1.4 of the Resize and Rotate (RandR) extension was supposed to be introduced with X.Org Server 1.9 (to the point that it delayed closing their merge window), it never made it. RandR 1.4 and its per-CRTC pixmaps once again delayed closing the merge window, but this time it's for X.Org Server 1.10 and its promised to only be a few days. Fortunately, it looks like Keith Packard was right this time and RandR 1.4 is about to land.

Apple's Jeremy Huddleston has announced the second release candidate for the forthcoming X.Org Server 1.9.3 point release. This point release in the stable 1.9 series delivers on more bug-fixes, with a handful of them for Apple's XQuartz, which is important especially as it looks the 1.9 series will be used by Mac OS X 10.7.

While the X Server 1.10 merge window should soon close, the patches for implementing X Input 2.1 / Multi-Touch support are on track for the next release, X Server 1.11. Ubuntu is also expected to ship these patches with their X.Org Server in Ubuntu 11.04.

While the merge window was supposed to close yesterday for X.Org Server 1.10, which is supposed to be released in February, it looks like Keith Packard will keep it open for a few more days. Keith Packard, who is continuing to serve as the X.Org Server release manager, wants to keep the 1.10 merge window open until at least next Monday so he can pull in some new code he has been developing.

It's long been a topic of what parts of X.Org should be killed with fire. There's plenty of dated and obscure X.Org and Mesa drivers around for hardware that hasn't even been manufactured in years and are rarely used. At XDS Toulose and on other occasions it's been decided not to do a massive purge of all these legacy graphics drivers for Linux. Old hardware support by the X Server has once again been brought up, but this time it's about monitors.

The X.Org Server 1.10 merge window closes tomorrow for for its release schedule so that it can ideally be released on time in mid-February (hopefully we will finally see X.Org 7.6 before then too). This next X.Org Server release isn't particularly interesting but is more along the lines of a big maintenance update with some new fun on the input side.

We have been tipped off that a few VA-API patches have hit the upstream libva tree for furthering along Google's Android support for this video acceleration API. VA-API is arguably the second best video playback acceleration API available to Linux users, after the NVIDIA-created VDPAU.

Being brought up from the discussion surrounding the RadeonHD driver being vandalized, which wound up just being a prank by two X.Org developers to torment one of the former RadeonHD developers, was a discussion why more companies don't contribute back to X.Org. Do companies think the X.Org code is too hard? That it's not worth the time? Is it all politics?

Last night when checking to see if VIA has made any open-source / Linux progress that went unnoticed (they haven't), that also led me to see what S3 Graphics is up to these days. S3 Graphics doesn't back any open-source driver strategy and they don't have many GPUs on the market, but their binary Linux driver claims to support OpenGL 3, VDPAU, and even kernel mode-setting since last year.

Somebody with root access to the FreeDesktop.org server decided to vandalize the RadeonHD graphics driver in this Git commit. The make files were deleted and replaced with "It's dead, Jim" and a Git commit message line of "PERHAPS BONGHITS WILL FIX MY MAKEFILE." The supplied email address was "[email protected]."

While other hardware vendors are constantly improving their open-source support, this isn't the case for all vendors. VIA's open-source Linux support is still in very bad shape -- two and a half years after they had envisioned themselves becoming open-source friendly.

It was less than one month ago that Pixman 0.20 was released with faster image scaling, faster affine transformations, ARM NEON improvements, and SSE2 back-end optimizations, among other new features. The first development release towards Pixman 0.22 has now been released and it too brings more performance optimizations.

Canonical's Chase Douglas has corralled Daniel Stone's X Input 2.1 Multi-Touch patches and have readied them for integration into the X.Org Server and related software components.

Alan Coopersmith has announced the first release candidate of X.Org 7.6. Originally the X.Org 7.6 release was supposed to come in October, but that didn't happen and now into November we are finally seeing the first test katamari.

Two days ago there were some ATI R300 GLSL compiler optimizations made to the open-source Radeon driver stack by Tom Stellar as part of his Google Summer of Code project as a student developer to improve the R300 GLSL compiler support. This code is still living in a branch outside of Mesa, but some progress has been made. Though the R300 GLSL compiler optimization work was just one of five projects that were part of the 2010 Google Summer of Code for X.Org. Here's a few words on the other student projects.

A few weeks ago we reported that notebook hybrid graphics switching on Linux still sucks. For these newer laptops that boast dual GPUs -- an integrated low-power IGP and a more performance-oriented discrete GPU for demanding environments with switching between the two being done "seamlessly" in real-time based upon usage or via a hot-key -- the support under Linux is still virtually nonexistent. There is a crude form of Linux GPU switching, but for the most part it's not nearly up to par for what's available in Microsoft Windows 7 or Apple Mac OS X. The situation remains that way, but some small progress has been made.

While NVIDIA may not be focusing upon supporting the Wayland Display Server at this time, they are continuing to focus upon improving the experience of their driver with the X.Org Server. Three months after putting out their most recent X Sync object patches, they are now out with a revised set.

Haitao Feng, a software engineer at Intel China believed to be working on MeeGo, has come forward seeking clarification on the future of Xephyr and KDrive. Intel is still interested in Xephyr and Haitao is willing to maintain it, especially after doing work to add OpenGL acceleration to this KDrive-based X Server that targets a host on another X Server as it's frame-buffer.

Just over a week ago we reported on Pixmain gaining improved gradients and is rendering much faster in the project's latest development release. Now this free software project that provides pixel manipulation capabilities for the X Server and Cairo, has reached its version 0.20.0 stable milestone.

Apple's Jeremy Huddleston released X.Org Server 1.9.1 this past weekend, and now he has laid out plans for the next point release in the xorg-server 1.9 series. This release will carry the same type and quality of fixes as presented in X.Org Server 1.9.1 and should be released in December.

Mario Kleiner has published patches over the weekend that introduce precise vblank time-stamping support within the Linux kernel's DRM core and has implemented this support already within the Radeon and Intel kernel drivers too. The precise vblank timestamps and counting is needed by the DRI2 sync and swap extensions and in particular to conform with the OML_sync_control extension.

X.Org Server 1.9.1 was released yesterday, which led us to wonder about the status of the X.Org 7.6 katamari that was supposed to come at around the same time as this first stable point release. We hadn't heard anything about the X.Org 7.6 release schedule in weeks and before that the target to ship this grouped collection of X packages was mid-October, which has clearly passed.

As we mentioned earlier, Apple's Jeremy Huddleston took over release management of the X.Org Server 1.9 series now that it's stable and will only receive bug-fixes from this point on. Meanwhile, Keith Packard and the gang of X.Org developers are focusing on X.Org Server 1.10 to have that ready by early next year. Jeremy Huddleston on this Saturday night has just made his first point release, X.Org Server 1.9.1.