Most Drivers Won't Be Merged Into X Server 1.10

The last talk of the 2010 X.Org Developers' Summit was regarding X.Org Server 1.10. The good news is that nearly every X.Org graphics driver will not be merged back into the xorg-server repository.

The release schedule for X.Org Server 1.10 was talked about, which has the final release set to arrive in February. Some of the features for this next major X.Org Server release include libxkb, RandR 1.4, input clean-ups, threaded input events, and other clean-ups. "It's pretty much our job right now to remove system-level code out of the server and into a share-able environment." Such work also directly benefits the Wayland Display Server, like the XKB common library that was talked about.

Merging drivers back into the X.Org Server was a hotly debated topic to the point that yesterday it was said merging the graphics drivers back in would effectively kill the Linux desktop. The good news, however, is that this won't happen.

As predicted, the xf86-input- drivers will likely be integrated into the X.Org Server, but the xf86-video- drivers will remain outside the xorg-server unless an individual driver maintainer wants to move in the driver. So far none of the open-source driver maintainers have come forward to say they will go ahead and integrate their code into the X.Org Server, not even Keith Packard who proposed this plan to begin with in order to clean-up the API/ABI and force the X.Org Server to receive better testing. Alex Deucher with the ATI/AMD Radeon driver is also not interested in moving his driver back into the server.

Though at least one video driver will be merged into the xorg-server and that would be the dummy DDX driver, which actually isn't useful for anyone besides learning to write an X.Org driver. Merging the driver into the X.Org Server may actually make it easier to track when there is ABI breakage of the xorg-server.