After six months of development, the release of XLibre 25.1.0, a fork of X.Org Server, has been published. The first release of the XLibre XServer 25.1.0 branch is positioned as beta quality and is intended for testing and identifying potential issues. Following this, two more beta versions are planned, after which the branch will be declared stable in the 25.1.3 release.
The project is being developed by Enrico Weigelt, who holds the record for the number of changes prepared for the X server — before Enrico created the fork from X.Org Server, around 1600 changes had been accepted, and over 1200 changes have been included in the fork's codebase. Enrico is also the maintainer of AMD FCH GPIO and VIRTIO GPIO drivers in the Linux kernel, and the maintainer of Xnest.
The reason for creating the fork was disagreement with the policies of the maintainers of X.Org, which lead to stagnation in development, whereas Enrico advocated for active continued development and a major cleanup of the X server. The maintainers' dissatisfaction with Enrico, which led to the cessation of accepting his changes, was due to some of the cleanup-related changes causing problems, regressions, ABI violations, and build failures. Additionally, Enrico had a tendency towards conspiracy theories and claimed that Red Hat was deliberately hindering X server development.
Among the changes in the XLibre XServer 25.1 release:
- Support has been added for the libseat library and the seatd background process, providing capabilities for session management and access organization for shared input and output devices (can be used as an alternative to session management components from systemd).
- Improved support for proprietary NVIDIA drivers. In addition to the previously supported NVIDIA driver releases 570+, support has been added for older branches 340, 390, and 470, activated by specifying the flag "legacy_nvidia_padding" when building Xserver, allowing one to avoid setting the IgnoreABI parameter in the ServerFlags directive. On systems with NVIDIA drivers, support for the GLAMOR 2D acceleration architecture has been enabled, which uses OpenGL to accelerate 2D operations (previously, GLAMOR support was disabled due to incompatibility with the modesetting DDX driver on systems with NVIDIA drivers; this incompatibility has now been resolved).
- The Xfbdev X server, which uses the framebuffer provided by the framebuffer device (/dev/fb*) in Linux, has been returned. Xfbdev can operate without graphical drivers and is suitable for use in embedded systems and environments with limited resources.
- Support for the Cygwin platform (GNU environment for Windows) has been added.
- The ability to set the DPI property binding to different monitors has been introduced.
- Support for the deprecated DGA 1.0 protocol has been removed from the dga driver.
- More than 20 changes related to code cleanup have been made.
- Continuous integration has implemented build testing for the DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Win32 (mingw32), and Cygwin (x86-64) platforms. Furthermore, for DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, mingw32, and Ubuntu, a build check with the flag "-Werror" has been added.
Source: opennet.ru
