X.Org Looks To Drop DMX After Being Rather Broken For ~14 Years

Written by Michael Larabel in X.Org on 4 September 2021 at 03:00 AM EDT. 56 Comments
X.ORG
X.Org's DMX DDX driver for supporting Distributed Multi-Head X looks like it will be removed from the source tree after finding out the code has been rather broken for the past 14 years.

Back around 2007, Xdmx broke rather significantly in that if any client attempts to use OpenGL it will crash. Xdmx for distributed multi-head X serves as a proxy server so multiple displays for a desktop can be hosted from different machines / X.Org Servers. Not exactly a popular feature these days and apparently extremely rarely used given that a significant feature like OpenGL support can be broken for Xdmx clients for more than one decade.

Back in 2017, Red Hat's Adam Jackson posted a patch to fix the support. However, that patch was never merged. That 2017 patch stemmed from a 2011 bug report over GLX/OpenGL applications yielding segmentation faults.

Now in 2021, it's proposed to just drop the DMX DDX code outright from the source tree and the imminent X.Org Server 21.1 release. It looks like there are no active users left to this code given its brokenness.
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