Exactly one year after the foundation of the X.Org Server fork, the XLibre 25.1.6 release has been presented. This release marks the transition of the 25.1 branch to stable status (previous updates were beta-quality and intended for testing). XLibre is used by default in the Artix Linux, GhostBSD, OpenMandriva, and Vendefoul Wolf distributions. For Arch Linux, Debian, DragonFly BSD, Fedora, FreeBSD, Gentoo Linux, GNU Guix, Linux Mint, MX Linux, RHEL, Slackware, Ubuntu, and Void Linux, community-supported packages are available to replace X.Org Server with XLibre.
Key changes in the XLibre XServer 25.1 branch:
- Support for the libseat library and background process seatd has been added, providing capabilities for session management and access to shared input/output devices (it can be used as an alternative to systemd-logind).
- Improved support for proprietary NVIDIA drivers. In addition to previously supported NVIDIA driver releases 570+, support for older branches 340, 390, and 470 has been added, which can be activated by specifying the ‘legacy_nvidia_padding’ flag during the Xserver build, allowing one to avoid setting the IgnoreABI parameter in the ServerFlags directive.
On systems with NVIDIA drivers, support for the 2D acceleration architecture GLAMOR is 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.
- The X11 extension Xnamespace has been implemented, providing client isolation through namespace segregation at the X11 level.
- 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.
- Continuous integration has implemented build testing for the DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Cygwin (x86-64), macOS, and Windows platforms.
- Vulnerabilities CVE-2026-50256, CVE-2026-50257, CVE-2026-50258, CVE-2026-50259, CVE-2026-50260, CVE-2026-50261, CVE-2026-50262, and CVE-2026-50263 have been addressed, recently fixed in X.Org Server 21.1.23 and xwayland 24.1.12.
The project is led by Enrico Weigelt, who ranks first in the number of changes prepared for the X server — before Enrico created the fork from X.Org Server, around 1,600 changes were accepted, and more than 1,200 changes have been included in the fork's codebase. Enrico is also the maintainer of the AMD FCH GPIO and VIRTIO GPIO drivers in the Linux kernel, as well as the maintainer of Xnest. The fork was created due to disagreements with the policies of the X.Org maintainers, which led to stagnation in development, while Enrico advocated for active continued development and a significant cleanup of the X server. The dissatisfaction among the maintainers regarding Enrico, which led to the cessation of accepting changes from him, stemmed from some of the changes related to the cleanup resulting in issues, regressions, ABI breaks, and build failures.
Source: opennet.ru
