Red Hat has announced the plan to discontinue support for the X.org server in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 distribution. Initially, the X.org Server was declared obsolete and slated for removal in a future version of RHEL over a year ago in the release notes for RHEL 9.1. The ability to run X11 applications in a Wayland session, enabled via the XWayland DDX server, will be maintained. The first release of the RHEL 10 branch, in which X.org Server will no longer be included, is scheduled for the first half of 2025.
The transition from the X Window System, which will turn 40 next year, to a newer Wayland-based stack has been underway for 15 years, and Red Hat has been actively involved from the very beginning. Over time, it became clear that the X11 protocol and the X.org server have fundamental issues that need to be addressed, and Wayland emerged as that solution. Today, Wayland is recognized as the de facto infrastructure for window systems and graphic output in Linux.
While the community has been implementing new features and fixing issues in Wayland, the development of server X.org and X11 infrastructure has been winding down. Wayland is significantly improving, but this leads to increased maintenance burdens for both stacks: there is much new work to support Wayland, but there remains a need to maintain the legacy X.org stack. Ultimately, this fragmentation of efforts has led to challenges and a desire to focus on addressing core tasks.
As Wayland has developed and expanded its capabilities, Red Hat, together with various hardware and software vendors, customers, representatives from the visual effects (VFX) industry, and other projects, has been working to understand and develop the necessary projects to overcome existing limitations and expand the Wayland stack. Among such projects are:
- Support for high dynamic range (HDR) and color management;
- The development of XWayland as a foundation for backward compatibility with X11 clients;
- The development of infrastructure to support modern solutions for remote desktops; tables;
- Analysis and development of explicit synchronization support in the Wayland protocol and related projects;
- Creation of the Libei library to provide emulation and input capture;
- Participation in the Wakefield initiative to ensure OpenJDK works with (X)Wayland.
At the beginning of 2023, as part of RHEL 10 planning, engineers from Red Hat conducted a study to understand the state of Wayland not only from an infrastructure perspective but also from an ecosystem standpoint. The assessment concluded that, despite some remaining issues and applications requiring specific adaptations, overall, the infrastructure and ecosystem of Wayland are in good shape, and the outstanding issues can be resolved by the release of RHEL 10.
As a result, it has been decided to remove the X.org server and other X servers (except for Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and subsequent releases. Xwayland is expected to handle most X11 clients that will not be immediately migrated to Wayland. If necessary, clients can remain on RHEL 9 for its entire lifecycle while transition issues to the Wayland ecosystem are addressed. The announcement notably states that "X.org Server" and "X11" should not be seen as synonyms: X11 is a protocol that will continue to be supported through Xwayland, while X.org Server is one of the implementations of the X11 protocol.
The removal of X.org Server will allow, starting with RHEL 10, to focus efforts solely on the modern stack and ecosystem, enabling the resolution of issues such as HDR support, enhanced security, the ability to operate simultaneously with monitors of varying pixel densities, improved hot-plugging of graphics cards and displays, and better gesture and scrolling management, among others.
Source: opennet.ru
