Red Hat planira da prekine razvoj servera X.Org

Christian Schaller, the head of the desktop systems development group at Red Hat and Fedora Desktop Team, in the review of plans, related to desktop components in Fedora 31, mentioned Red Hat's intention to cease active development of the X.Org server functionality and to limit itself to maintaining the existing codebase and fixing bugs.

Currently, Red Hat makes a key contribution to the development of the X.Org server and shoulders its maintenance, so if they withdraw from development, it is unlikely that significant releases of the X.Org server will continue. However, despite ceasing development, Red Hat will continue to support X.Org at least until the end of the lifecycle of the RHEL 8 distribution, which will last until 2029.

Stagnation in the development of the X.Org server is already evident — despite the previously used six-month release cycle, the last major release, X.Org Server 1.20, was published 14 months ago, and the preparation for release 1.21 is stalled. The situation could change if a company or community takes on the continuation of feature development for the X.Org server, but considering the widespread shift of significant projects towards Wayland, it is unlikely that there will be any takers.

Currently, Red Hat is focusing on improving the desktop experience based on Wayland. The transition of the X.Org server to maintenance mode is expected after solving the task of completely removing dependencies on X.Org components and ensuring GNOME Shell runs without using XWayland, which requires refactoring or removing remaining bindings to X.Org. Such bindings are almost eliminated from GNOME Shell, but still remain in the GNOME Settings daemon. In GNOME 3.34 or 3.36, it is planned to completely eliminate bindings to X.Org and organize the startup of XWayland dynamically, as needed for components to ensure compatibility with X11.

It is also mentioned that there is a need to address a number of remaining issues s Wayland, kot so delo s proprietarnimi gonilniki NVIDIA in izboljšava DDX strežnika XWayland za zagotavljanje kakovostnega zagona X-aplikacij v okolju sistema Wayland. Med pripravami na Fedora 31 je bila izvedena možnost zagona X-aplikacij s privilegiji root v XWayland. Takšen zagon je dvomljiv z vidika varnosti, a nujen za zagotavljanje združljivosti z X-programi, ki potrebujejo delo s povečano privilegiranostjo.

Druga naloga je izboljšanje podpore Wayland v knjižnici SDL, na primer, za reševanje težav z razmerjem med starimi igrami, ki delujejo pri nizkih ločljivostih zaslona. Prav tako je potrebno izboljšati podporo za delo z Wayland v sistemih s proprietarnimi gonilniki NVIDIA — čeprav Wayland že dolgo deluje nad tovrstnimi gonilniki, pa XWayland v tej konfiguraciji še vedno ne more uporabljati sredstev za strojno pospeševanje 3D grafike (načrtuje se omogočiti nalaganje x.org gonilnika NVIDIA za XWayland).

Dodatno se nadaljuje delo na zamenjavi PulseAudio in Jack z večpredstavnostnim strežnikom PipeWire, ki razširja možnosti PulseAudio s sredstvi za obdelavo video tokov in zvoka z minimalnimi zamudami, ob upoštevanju potreb sistemov za profesionalno obdelavo zvoka, ter ponuja razširjen model varnosti za upravljanje dostopa na ravni posameznih naprav in tokov. V okviru razvojnega cikla Fedora 31 se delo osredotoča na uporabo PipeWire za organizacijo skupne rabe zaslona v okoljih na osnovi Wayland, vključno z uporabo protokola Miracast.

V Fedora 31 je prav tako je načrtovan dodana možnost zagona Qt-aplikacij v GNOME seji na osnovi Wayland z uporabo vtičnika Qt Wayland namesto vtičnika XCB, ki uporablja X11/XWayland.

Izvor: opennet.ru