X.Org News Archives

While Cairo is frequently mentioned on Phoronix, mentioned less but used by Cairo (as well as the X.Org Server) for pixel manipulation is the Pixman library. Soeren Sandmann announced a new release candidate of Pixman 0.19.6 this afternoon and it has a few interesting changes worth noting.

Takashi Iwai of Novell/SuSE has just published a series of 18 patches for the X.Org Synaptics input driver that primarily provides multi-touch support. There's also some fixes and other changes to this Synaptics driver for X, but the primary feature is the addition of multi-touch support under Linux (and other X.Org-using operating systems) for supported hardware.

Under the release management of Apple's Jeremy Huddleston, the first release candidate for the first point release in the X.Org Server 1.9 series is now available. X.Org Server 1.9.1 will be the first update to X.Org Server 1.9, which was released in August, and should make it out around the same time as the X.Org 7.6 katamari release later in October.

Besides talking about the X.Org Server development process and the X.Org Server 1.10 plans, Keith Packard also talked about not running the X.Org Server as root (also sometimes referred to as a "root-less X Server") during XDS Toulouse.

The 2010 X.Org Developers' Summit in Toulouse has been over for a week, but the disappointing weather in Munich today Oktoberfest finally made it sound more enticing to take care of the remaining XDS 2010 coverage rather than drinking Augustiner in a wet pair of lederhosens. With that said, below are the video recordings of when Keith Packard and Peter Hutterer were talking about the X.Org Server development process changes that have resulted in surprisingly on-time releases.

As a reminder to those interested in participating in our annual Linux Graphics Survey, there's now less than a week before this survey officially is over at month's end. This survey is meant to provides some quantitative data about what the Linux community is most interested in when it comes to graphics driver features and the hardware and drivers currently being most utilized, etc.

A few days back I reported on the first operating system where you may see the Wayland Display Server used rather than an X.Org Server after talking with Kristian Høgsberg while in Toulouse. At the X.Org Developer Summit' he talked to everyone about EGL in Mesa, which also plays an important role with Wayland.

The last talk of the 2010 X.Org Developers' Summit was regarding X.Org Server 1.10. The good news is that nearly every X.Org graphics driver will not be merged back into the xorg-server repository.

The X.Org Developers' Summit in Toulouse, France just ended and it's time in the morning to head to Oktoberfest to meet with many Phoronix readers at this annual outing. XDS 2010 turned out to be a wonderful event and more organized than some X.Org events in the past. Thanks to the wonderful organization by Matthieu Herrb, the venue itself was nice, the social event last night was terrific, the Internet and power at the event was plenty, etc. Stay tuned for Phoronix notes and some audio/video recordings to be published in the coming days, beyond what has already been reported. At XDS 2010 it was also brought up where to host XDS 2011.

While X Server 1.10 is not being discussed at length until tomorrow (the final day of XDS Toulouse), besides today's notes, Luc Verhaegen who formerly was with Novell working on the RadeonHD driver and has also worked on the open-source VIA Unichrome driver and a few other X related projects, is preparing for another heated battle.

More details will come later along with the audio/video recordings that ended out the X.Org Developers' Summit in Toulouse, but here are a few random bits from so far today:

Originally at the X.Org Developers' Summit here in Toulouse this week there was going to be a talk entitled "Kill It With Fire" where Corbin Simpson (mostly known for his work on the ATI R300 Gallium3D driver) was going to be speaking about what drivers or parts of X.Org should be eliminated from the stack. This talk though is no longer occurring, in part as Corbin is no longer in attendance; he washed his US passport in the laundry.

Scheduling issues had plagued X.Org Server development for the past few years: to the point that even delivering a point release had come more than a year late and major X Server releases were never delivered on time. This though has fortunately changed.

Matt Dew, a self-proclaimed "X newbie", just finished talking about his experiences as just entering the world of X.Org development and hopes to contribute to the X.Org world by gathering up and improving X.Org documentation.

XDS 2010 has just begun in Toulouse, France. Well, besides yesterday's pre-event where we were discussing Wayland and other topics. At the moment just the X.Org Foundation itself is being discussed.

While there are only a few days left until the 2010 X Developers' Summit, Keith Packard has laid out his plans for the development of X.Org Server 1.10.

For those interested in the X Developers' Summit (XDS) that is taking place next week at a tobacco factory in France, a tentative schedule has now been published by Matthieu Herrb for the 50 or so people that will be participating in the summit.

While there is Oktoberfest in two weeks, in just a week and a half there is the annual X.Org Developers' Summit. This year's summit for these developers is taking place in Toulouse, France. The event was going to be hosted at a conference room at the University of Toulouse, but due to delays in renovating that room, this X.Org summit has been moved to an ex-tobacco factory.

Two years ago we compiled a list of the top contributors to the X Server over the years and that was followed by compiling a similar list of the developers behind Mesa. Tiago Vignatti has now compiled some statistics surrounding the top contributors to X.Org Server 1.9 and related X components just looking at this most recent development cycle. There's also numbers for the input, video, and Mesa components too.

Earlier this month Canonical introduced its own multi-touch framework for Ubuntu that is set to premiere with Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" and it's called UTouch and is joined by their own gesture/touch language. That same day as announcing UTouch for Ubuntu that will support devices like the Apple Magic TrackPad and Dell XT2, Canonical proposed the X.Org Gesture Extension to the X.Org development community. While it's good to see Canonical making more contributions to upstream projects that it depends upon for Ubuntu Linux, the X.Org Gesture Extension is already being re-evaluated and may in fact not be needed.

While X.Org Servger 1.9 was released less than a week ago (heck, it's only been four days since releasing om time), the first interesting patch for X.Org Server 1.10 is already queued up and on the X.Org development mailing list for discussion. This patch, which was written by Tiago Vignatti and Fernando Carrijo, provides the "thread-ification" of the X Server input event generation code. Rather than being bound to the same thread as the X Server, the input event code with this patch is now running in its own thread, but this may only be the start of things to come with finally multi-threading the X.Org Server.

Keith Packard has announced the official release of X.Org Server 1.9 this evening. Besides this release offering up various bug-fixes and minor improvements, this X Server release is noteworthy as it happens to be the first release in recent times to actually make it out on time. X.Org Server 1.9 hit its original release schedule of being released on the 20th of August.

As many learned today, there's been a rather critical bug living within the Linux kernel for several years (as possibly far back as the original Linux 2.6 kernel release) that was finally fixed and this "high priority" bug is now publicly detailed. This issue (CVE-2010-2240), which allows arbitrary code to be executed as root, is easily exploitable by most current Linux desktops via simply running any compromised GUI application that has access to the running X.Org Server.

Earlier this morning Canonical had announced the UTouch Framework, which is their multi-touch framework to be formally introduced with Ubuntu 10.10. Canonical developers crafted up their own multi-touch solution and even their own gesture language for Ubuntu, rather than leveraging any similar free software projects, but -- to some surprise -- it turns out they are now going to try to engage with upstream developers to at least have a formalized extension to the X.Org Server for gestures.

Last night there was the sixth and potentially last release candidate of X.Org Server 1.9. The xorg-server 1.8.99.906 test release contains various fixes and documentation updates reflecting X Server 1.9 API changes. The final release of xorg-server 1.9 should be just around the corner and may come as soon as next week.

Even the nearly-defunct XGI Technology Inc is able to produce open-source graphics driver code for Linux while VIA continues on with their Linux mess, even with XGI developers working from Windows. In preparations for the X.Org 7.6 Katamari and this month's release of X Server 1.9, a new release of the XGI DDX driver has been made available.

If all goes according to plan, X.Org Server 1.9 will be released in about two weeks, but after that there still is the X.Org 7.6 release "katamari" to be done. While X.Org releases themselves aren't as important any longer with the X Server releases being done at different points and the rest of the X.Org package collection being modular, the X.Org 7.6 release is expected in October.

The Linux 2.6.36 kernel is set to carry some much-anticipated changes like AppArmor integration, major VFS performance improvements, a likely Btrfs performance regression fix, and quite a few changes when it comes to the graphics Direct Rendering Manager code. Just when it comes to the Linux DRM code in this next kernel release there is quite a bit of fun with the Intel kernel driver better supporting Embedded DisplayPort and tracepoints for page-flipping and vblank, the ATI Radeon kernel driver gaining R600/700 tiling support / support for reading R600 thermal sensors / R300 through R500 Hyper-Z support, and the Nouveau driver supporting KMS with the GeForce GTX 400 series and better DisplayPort capabilities. While the Intel, ATI/AMD, and NVIDIA/Nouveau DRM driver improvements will excite a majority of the desktop Linux user-base caring about open-source graphics drivers for their hardware, it's not enough to excite everyone. In particular, VIA is still missing from the field -- more than two years after they announced a new open-source initiative and promised to better engage within the Linux ecosystem.

Peter Hutterer, one of the few X.Org input developers and the developer behind Multi-Pointer X when he was a student in Australia, has now published the first public draft of the multi-touch protocol specification. The multi-touch protocol specification is a low-level spec to be integrated with the X Input Extension for further enriching the multi-touch capabilities on Linux and other operating systems using the X.Org Server.

X.Org Server 1.9 is due to be released in just about one month, so as such, Keith Packard the release manager has pushed out the fifth release candidate of this forthcoming X.Org update. As said by Keith, "Not a huge number of changes this time around, but a couple of useful bug fixes."

There is just over two months left until the 2010 X.Org Developers' Summit taking place in Toulouse, France. There's just over 30 registered participants at this time and not much has changed since the reminder a few weeks back, but a few more of the sessions have been expressed.

There's just about a month and a half left until Keith Packard hopes to ship X Server 1.9, so as such he has put out another release candidate today of this updated xorg-server -- on the same-day that the X Server 1.8.2 point release made it out.

Peter Hutterer has announced the official release of X.Org Server 1.8.2, after it has went through two release candidates over the past month. No new changes have been introduced since X.Org Server 1.8.2 RC2 and since the release of X.Org Server 1.8.1 in mid-May it just carries more bug-fixes, a couple DRI2 updates, and addresses other maintenance items.

Matthieu Herrb is sending out reminders this morning that the 2010 X.Org Developers' Summit is taking place this September in Toulouse, France. From the 16th through the 18th of September at the University of Toulouse, the X.Org developers and interested parties will be discussing various topics related to Linux graphics and input.

GNOME developer Benjamin Otte has published quite a few benchmarks on his blog showing off the Cairo performance with the Xlib and OpenGL back-ends on Intel hardware and also NVIDIA hardware with the open-source Nouveau driver.

Based upon a recent email to the X.Org developers' mailing list, Canonical is nearing the point of one of their goals for Ubuntu 10.10 of a rootless X Server, or being able to run the X.Org Server without root privileges.

The second X.Org Server 1.9 release candidate was released earlier today after the first RC making it out just last week, but already the third release candidate is available to interested parties.

Keith Packard has just announced the release of X.Org Server 1.9 RC2, which is coming just days after the first release candidate. This second release candidate for the updated X Server pulls in most of the remaining patches that were requested prior to the RC1 release last week.

Earlier this month there was the release of X.Org Server 1.8.2 RC1, but last night the second release candidate was pushed out by Peter Hutterer, who has been managing the X Server point releases. The 1.8.2 RC2 release should be quite representative of the final release barring any last minute problems.

In past days we have reported on the work being done at the moment for improving the ATI R300 GLSL compiler and kernel mode-setting support for old 3Dlabs GPUs by students participating in the X.Org project with Google's Summer of Code. Igor Trindade Oliveira, another GSoC student developer, has blogged about the work he is doing this summer on creating a Gallium3D state tracker for Cairo.

Earlier this month we reported on the ATI R300 GLSL compiler improvements being worked on as part of a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project for X.Org, but how are their other 2010 projects progressing by these student developers? There's five GSoC X.Org projects in total this year and last night we received a bit of an update on the kernel mode-setting (KMS) efforts for porting the Glint driver.

More than a week ago we reported on the X.Org Server 1.9 release status and how it was still planned for release in August, the merge window would be closing after some RandR 1.4 code got pulled in, and the first release candidate was supposed to come that day. Well, finally, that first release candidate has arrived.

There's good news for the Ubuntu camp and others releasing in the September-October time-frame: development work on X.Org Server 1.9 is still going as planned for an August release and its merge window is about to be closed. In the past it's been tough for the X.Org project to release server updates in a timely manner that's on schedule, but continuing from their X.Org Server 1.8 success, 1.9 is shaping up nicely too.

While there is multi-touch support in Qt and also Clutter along with MPX capabilities in GTK+ 3.0, the widely-used xf86-input-evdev driver up to this point has not supported multi-touch. Developers, however, have been working on the said support for evdev, which is the generic Linux input driver.

X.Org Server 1.8.1 was released just one month ago, but Peter Hutterer is now preparing the release of X.Org Server 1.8.2. Due to time constraints, this is also the last planned point release he plans to put out.

The first version of the X protocol for the X Window System emerged in 1984 and just three years later we were at version 11. However, for the past 23 years, we have been stuck with X11 with no signs of the twelfth revision being in sight, even though there is a whole list of X12 plans and hopes on the FreeDesktop.org Wiki. Julien Danjou, an XCB developer, has written a lengthy blog post looking at the situation and the prospects for the X protocol.

Yesterday we reported on how VIA's open-source Linux dreams are not materializing and then this morning reported on a new secret driver being developed (xf86-video-openvia) between VIA Technologies, some VIA "friends", and the OpenChrome developers. However, as I said in this morning's VIA article, the situation is still a murky mess, this new OpenVIA driver isn't receiving much work, the DRM code with TTM/GEM memory management is still missing, and these open-source efforts by VIA are not very well organized.

Back in 2008 there was the announcement from the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Texas that VIA had joined the open-source driver bandwagon after having abandoned previous open-source attempts. However, for the past two years, this has largely been a media bluff. VIA Technologies did things like appoint an open-source liaison (Harald Welte, who is actually no longer contracted by VIA and didn't even do much for their efforts), launch a VIA Linux web-site (that is ill-maintained and two years later there are still portions of the site "under construction"), but they have done some things like put out some code and republishing old documentation. We're almost half-way through 2010 and it doesn't look like VIA will be doing much this year for their open-source graphics drivers.

Version 1.8 of the X.Org Server was just released at the start of April, but Intel's Keith Packard who's been serving as the release manager called for an even tighter release schedule with X.Org Server 1.9. Keith pushed plans for an August release of X Server 1.9. With that said, to meet that deadline, the merge window for the 1.9 release is closing at the start of June.

The talk at the Ubuntu Developer Summit surrounding the X.Org plans for Ubuntu 10.10 just wrapped up. Compared to the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release, Ubuntu 10.10 should provide a much more recent and up-to-date graphics experience.