The first release of the XLibre project, a fork of the X.Org Server, has been introduced. This release is positioned as a beta version and is intended for testing and identification of potential issues. XLibre 25.0 includes ABI changes, meaning that a rebuild of the X11 drivers is required for proper functionality. The project is open to collaboration with distributions and is ready to integrate patches accumulated during the maintenance of packages. proxy server X.Org.
The fork was created by Enrico Weigelt, who holds the record for the number of changes prepared for the X server—before the creation of the fork, approximately 1600 changes had been accepted into X.Org Server, and over 1200 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. Enrico invites anyone interested in contributing to the development and promoting X11 to join the work on XLibre, regardless of country, race, gender, age, political beliefs, or personal characteristics. Since the fork's founding, more than 10 contributors have joined the development, providing several dozen changes.
The reason for creating the fork was disagreement with the policies of X.Org maintainers, which led to stagnation in development, while Enrico advocated for active continuation of the development and a significant cleanup of the X server. The dissatisfaction of maintainers regarding Enrico, which resulted in the cessation of accepting changes from him, stemmed from the fact that some changes related to the cleanup caused issues, regressions, ABI breaks, and build failures. Furthermore, Enrico was inclined toward conspiracy theories and claimed that Red Hat was intentionally hindering the development of the X server.
In the first release of XLibre, alongside significant code cleanup and the elimination of technical debt (over a thousand patches), the following innovations have been introduced:
- Support for the X11 extension Xnamespace, which provides client isolation through namespace-level separation in X11.
- Porting Xnest to XCB and removing Xlib from dependencies.
- The ability to install different versions of ABI simultaneously (with a separate directory for drivers for each API variant) for seamless updates in distributions.
- Improved support for platforms other than Linux.
- Addressing accumulated vulnerabilities.
Source: opennet.ru
