X.Org News Archives

Peter Hutterer at Red Hat remains quite busy near single-handedly improving the Linux desktop input stack.

In addition to the Vulkan Virgl project another one of the interesting projects for Google Summer of Code 2018 is the development of VKMS, a Virtual KMS DRM driver.

While the recently released X.Org Server 1.20 has initial support for XWayland with EGLStreams so X11 applications/games on Wayland can still benefit from hardware acceleration, in its current state it doesn't integrate too well with Wayland desktop compositors wishing to support it. That's changing with a new patch series.

Anyone happening to have an ATI Mach 64 graphics card from the mid-90's or a 3Dfx-competitor Rendition graphics card also from the 90's can now enjoy the benefits of the recently released X.Org Server 1.20.

When it comes to open-source ARM Mali graphics driver efforts there has been the Panfrost driver targeting the Mali T700 series that has occupied much of the limelight recently, but there has been a separate effort still working on open-source driver support for the older 400/450 series.

Thomas Hellstrom of VMware who has worked on Mesa going back to the Tungsten Graphics days is developing a remote KMS back-end that could be transmitted over VNC or similar protocols.

Usually X.Org DDX driver releases aren't too notable these days with most of the open-source Linux graphics innovations happening elsewhere in the stack, but for those using the VMware graphics virtualization support available through their different virtualization products, the xf86-video-vmware update out today is on the heavier side.

Following the long drawn out and feature-packed X.Org Server 1.20 cycle, the 1.21 window officially opened up today.

If you were hoping to build the newly-released X.Org Server 1.20 on your system(s) this weekend, be forewarned that a number of the DDX drivers haven't yet been updated for supporting the API/ABI changes of this big server update.

After more than one and a half years in development that is well off their past six-month release cadence, the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.20 has finally been released as this stable X11 implementation for Linux desktop systems not yet prepared to migrate to Wayland.

While Peter Hutterer has been involved with the X.Org Server's input code and related projects for the past decade now and has spearheaded the projects around Multi Pointer X, X Input 2, and the Wayland/Xorg-using Libinput libraries, he's still had a tough time grasping the X.Org Server's pointer acceleration code.

Release manager Adam Jackson has sent out the last planned patches for integrating into xorg-server 1.20 prior to its long-awaited release.

FreeDesktop.org that is home to the X.Org Server and Mesa development along with Wayland/Weston and other projects like LibreOffice and GStreamer is working on migrating their services to GitLab.

With the release of the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.20 finally being imminent, here is a look at the many features that were merged over the past year and a half for this long drawn out release process. While more of the Linux desktop continues moving towards Wayland, X.Org Server continues evolving as shown by the 1.20 release and as part of that is also plenty on the XWayland side.

X.Org Server 1.19 was released 18 months ago and in the days ahead will finally be succeeded by the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.20 release.

With the recent release candidates to the long overdue X.Org Server 1.20, OpenGL rendering has been broken when using DDX drivers like Intel and Nouveau rather than the generic xf86-video-modesetting. That was fixed today.

Adam Jackson of Red Hat today announced the X.Org Server 1.20 Release Candidate 5, which he believes will be the last test release before going gold. Most excitingly about this new release candidate is the merged support for allowing the NVIDIA proprietary driver to work with XWayland.

It's still not clear if the EGLStreams XWayland support will be merged for xorg-server 1.20 but at least the patches were revised this week, making it possible to merge them into this next X.Org Server release for allowing the NVIDIA proprietary driver to work with XWayland.

The 2018 X.Org Board of Directors elections are over with 49 of the 91 X.Org registered members having casted a ballot.

Texas Instruments is still dealing with Imagination Tech PowerVR SGX GPUs and has now posted an open-source DRI3 WSEGL plug-in for getting this binary blob to work with 3D acceleration under an X.Org Server using Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3.

This year's X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC2018) has already received some big name sponsors.

On Tuesday a new X.Org Server 1.20 release candidate was issued by Red Hat's Adam Jackson for this prolonged development cycle now stretching well more than one and a half years.

The lengthy X.Org Server 1.20 development cycle continues with today Adam Jackson of Red Hat having put out a third release candidate.

As we have covered previously, the annual X.Org Developers Conference (XDC) for 2018 is being organized by the folks at consulting firm Igalia and will be hosted in A Coruña, Spain at the local university. This event is taking place from 26 to 28 September and they have now issued their call for papers.

Adam Jackson at Red Hat has announced the second release candidate to the long-in-development X.Org Server 1.20.

It looks like the much-delayed X.Org Server 1.20 release with its initial Meson build system support will almost be to feature parity with the server's Autotools build system integration.

If you are a member of the X.Org Foundation, it's important to get out to vote now.

Aside from a few touchpad issues and other minor random issues with select hardware, libinput these days is mostly in great shape for being a generic input handling library that is working out well for both X.Org and Wayland users.

There are six candidates running for this year's X.Org Foundation Board of Directors with four seats being open this election.

While the belated X.Org Server 1.20 is onto the release candidate stage, there still are some feature patches expected to land and among them is the per-window flipping support in the Present extension with support wired through for XWayland.

While we are past the first release candidate on the X.Org Server 1.20 release, one of the patch series still being wrangled for this update by release manager Adam Jackson is EGLStreams support for XWayland, benefiting the NVIDIA Linux driver.

We knew it was coming still for X.Org Server 1.20, but now the DRI3 v1.2 support has landed in the server.

Adam Jackson of Red Hat who is also the X.Org Server 1.20 release organizer has made available a Copr repository for those wanting to test this near-final X.Org Server and updated DDX drivers on Fedora systems.

Ahead of the imminent release of X.Org Server 1.20, several other X packages are seeing updates.

The xf86-video-modesetting DDX within the X.Org Server 1.20 code-base already has its support wired in for dealing with RandR leases while now Keith Packard has posted the patches for xf86-video-amdgpu.

As was planned yesterday, X.Org Server 1.20 Release Candidate 1 has become a reality.

2017 marked the first tine in a decade without seeing a major update to the X.Org Server. But finally X.Org Server 1.20 is now being prepared for release and it incorporates all the major work since the X.Org Server 1.19 debut in November 2016. Needless to say, xorg-server 1.20 is going to be a huge release.

Indeed it turns out that the landing today of RandR leases and deep color / color depth 30 support for GLAMOR/modesetting is because Red Hat's Adam Jackson is finally wrangling the xorg-server 1.20 release together.

One big piece of Keith Packard's work on improving Steam VR for Linux or particularly VR HMD handling is now merged to Git master.

Independent developer Mario Kleiner has spent the past several months working on plumbing the Linux graphics stack for better "deep color" or 30-bit color depth support. His latest work on the X.Org Server has now been merged to mainline.

The X.Org Foundation is calling on student developers to consider applying for this year's Google Summer of Code where you could be working on exciting projects for Nouveau, Mesa, Wayland, and more while gaining valuable work experience and earning a nice stipend.

Xorgproto debuted earlier this month as a centralized package of all X.Org protocol headers that used to be versioned and developed independently. Given the slower development now of the xorg-server and lots of the protocols being intertwined, they are now all bundled together. Tuesday marked the 2018.3 release with the new additions for Keith Packard's SteamVR Linux infrastructure work.

Should you find yourself using the xf86-video-vesa DDX for one reason or another, a new release is now available and it's the first in three years.

As a sign that DRI3 v1.1 is hopefully ready to go, Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne of Collabora on Friday sent out his latest set of patches adding modifiers and multi-plane support to the Direct Rendering Infrastructure.

There's been a lot of activity in xorg-server Git the past few days, making it look like the developers may be trying to wrap up the very long X.Org Server 1.20 cycle. The latest major feature work landing is GLXVND.

Keith Packard has sent out his latest patches for implementing the non-desktop and DRM lease functionality from within the X.Org Server. This work also includes the relevant DDX bits being wired through for the xf86-video-modesetting driver.

Last week marked the inaugural release of Xorgproto, a new package consisting of all the X.Org protocol headers rather than being in standalone packages now that X.Org Server development is slowing down and that many of these protocol headers wind up getting updated at the same time. Today marks the Xorgproto 2018.2 release.

With the NVIDIA proprietary driver continuing to only support EGLStreams for their Wayland support until the new "Unix device memory allocator" project pans out, one of the big limitations has been no XWayland support for running X11 applications. Fortunately, that's now changing.

Xorgproto had its inaugural release today as the collection of all the X.Org Server protocol headers formerly distributed as separate, standalone packages.

For the better part of a year NVIDIA developers and Adam Jackson at Red Hat have been working on "server-side GLVND" and this new X.Org Server feature might finally be close to landing.