X.Org Server 1.14 "Keemun Mao Feng" Released

Version 1.14 of the widely-used X.Org Server was released on Wednesday morning. While this is a six-month update to the X.Org Server, this time around it isn't a hugely exciting update.

Keith Packard tagged X.Org Server 1.14 in Git on Wednesday morning and issued this brief release announcement. Some of the changes in the past few weeks that landed as fixes since the earlier release candidate were fixes to the touch device, GPU hot-plugging bits, software rendering speed-ups due to taking advantage of new Pixman APIs, elimination of a lot of warning messages, and pointer barrier improvements.

In the Git tagging of X.Org Server 1.14.0, Packard codenamed this release "Keemun Mao Feng." Keemun Mao Feng is a variety of Keemum black Chinese tea.

The main features of X.Org Server 1.14 are pointer barriers and barrier releases. (Click that article to see details on those interested in this input feature sought after by desktop developers.)

Features that were sadly not integrated into X.Org Server 1.14 were XWayland, DRM Render Nodes, and DRI3/DRI-Next.

The NVIDIA binary Linux driver already supports the X.Org Server 1.14 ABI while the AMD Catalyst driver will likely take a few months before supporting this new release.

That's about it for this first X.Org Server update of 2013. X.Org Server 1.15 will probably be out around October or November of this year and will hopefully be more interesting from the feature perspective and ideally with XWayland integration (who knows about any XMir support).

There's been some talk of changing the X.Org Server development process but that discussion seems to have died. The X.Org Foundation has also talked about not doing anymore Katamari releases or reducing them to be even more infrequent.