X.Org News Archives

There's just under one month to go now until the X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) returns to A Coruña, Spain for the annual development conference focused on open-source graphics drivers (Mesa), Wayland, and related Linux display/graphics infrastructure although the X.Org Server itself hasn't received much attention in recent years. Here's a look at some of the planned talks for the exciting XDC 2023.

The second release candidate of XWayland 23.2 is now available that restores an earlier performance optimization around depth 24 windows.

The most popular topic among the emails I received this weekend weren't of direct technical nature but the number of people pointing out Twitter's new "X" logo and the similarities to the X.Org logo.

The release candidate is out today for XWayland 23.2 as the next update for this code that allows for X11 clients to function within Wayland environments.

X.Org members have approved of the X.Org Foundation letting the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) become its fiscal sponsor.

The xf86-video-ati 22.0 driver has been released as a rare update to this X.Org DDX driver used by older pre-GCN ATI/AMD Radeon graphics cards.

In clearing up the state of various X.Org packages that have been effectively unmaintained for years, an attempt is being made to better communicate the status of some "retired" X.Org packages that Linux distributions should work towards removing as they are no longer being maintained.

Longtime X.Org release wrangler Alan Coopersmith at Oracle spent some of his Easter working out new releases of seldom-touched X.Org graphics/display drivers.

Peter Hutterer, Red Hat's leading Linux input expert, today released xf86-input-libinput 1.3 as the newest version of this X.Org Server driver for making use of libinput in an X.Org Server world.

For over a decade now the X.Org Server has been seeing routine security disclosures in its massive codebase with some security researchers saying it's even worse than it looks and security researchers frequently finding multiple vulnerabilities at a time in the large and aging code-base that these days rarely sees new feature work. Today another disclosure was made by the folks with the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative.

While XWayland is in fairly good shape for enjoying both native and emulated games relying on X11 to run atop Wayland compositors for Linux gaming, occasionally different peculiar issues are uncovered. The most recent issue analyzed and addressed in XWayland Git is over the game Resident Evil 6 causing XWayland to hang and consume 100% of the CPU resources on launching that title.

The X.Org Board of Directors has delayed their election process by two weeks in hopes of having more candidates nominated to run for the board as currently they do not have enough candidates to start an election.

A few months back the generic xf86-video-modesetting X.Org driver added TearFree page-flipping support. The option eliminates screen tearing without the use of a compositor and was seen as a win by many for this generic DDX driver that works atop the modern DRM/KMS kernel drivers. But a rather annoying issue was discovered that could lead to audio/video synchronization problems was uncovered and is now fixed in the latest driver code.

A week after seeing X.Org display driver updates for old Trident and S3 Graphics hardware, a new release of xf86-video-ark is now available that provides the open-source UMS display driver support for old ARK Logic hardware. ARK Logic only lasted through the 1990's as a purveyor of PCI video cards.

New releases of the xf86-video-trident and xf86-video-s3virge X.Org drivers are now available for those still rocking out to old Trident and S3 graphics hardware.

Back in 2018 the X.Org Developers Conference (XDC) was hosted in A Coruña, Spain by Igalia developers and for XDC2023 it's again returning.

The X.Org Server keeps on giving when it comes to security vulnerabilities with its massive, aging, and ill-maintained code-base. Disclosed on Monday night was CVE-2023-0494 as the latest security advisory and another discovery by the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative.

In marking ten years since the prior release, Xvidtune 1.0.4 was released on Saturday with all the patches that have buult up over the past decade.

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer has released new versions of the xf86-video-qxl and xf86-video-vmware DDX drivers for those making use of these X.Org drivers in virtualized environments.

NVIDIA engineer Austin Shafer has contributed linux_dmabuf v4 feedback protocol support for upstream XWayland. This is working towards allowing scan-out modifiers that a compositor advertises to be delivered to X11 applications under (X)Wayland.

Stemming from the X.Org Server change to no longer allow byte-swapped clients by default due to the feature being rarely used but of significant security concerns with being a large attack surface, GNOME's Mutter compositor has added optional support for being able to enable byte-swapped XWayland clients.

Following the recent discussions around Fedora planning to disable byte swapped clients support for the X.Org Server in order to close another "large attack surface" with the aging X11 server codebase, the upstream X.Org Server has now dropped this support by default.

It shouldn't be news to you that most of the corporate-backed developers working on the Linux desktop are no longer investing in new feature work around the X.Org Server and have shifted their efforts to a Wayland-focused environment moving forward. In looking at the Git statistics for the X.Org Server over the course of 2022 it shows how the development has pulled back dramatically and now at a two decade low for the commits and code changes.

The xf86-video-modesetting work covered a month ago over "TearFree" page flipping support has been merged to the X.Org Server for whenever the next release ends up happening.

The X.Org Server and XWayland have new releases out ahead of the holidays, but it's not for Christmas feature releases and instead for fixing a number of new security issues.

While X.Org Katamari releases are no longer being organized to bundle up all of the different X11 software components behind one version number and some X.Org software pieces are seeing very seldom updates every number of years, this past week has seen twenty new X.Org software releases.

While several X.Org DDX drivers in the past have implemented a "TearFree" xorg.conf driver option to try to eliminate screen tearing when running an X.Org Server without a composited environment, the xf86-video-modesetting generic DDX that is widely used has lacked that option. That is until a developer finally stepped up and has pending support for the "TearFree" option.

Currently when hot-plugging a new GPU to a running X.Org Server, the generic xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver ends up being utilized. However, a new "HotplugDriver" xorg.conf option has been introduced by AMD to allow users to specify their desired DDX driver. In turn this makes it possible for those hot-plugging hardware like AMD Radeon GPUs such as within eGPU enclosures to specify using the xf86-video-amdgpu driver instead.

Earlier this month marked the release of IceWM 3.0 as this X11 window manager that has been around since the late 90's. IceWM 3.1 is now available with various fixes and minor additions -- including refinements to the tabbed windows support introduced in IceWM 3.0.

The OpenChrome DRM driver has been in development for over a decade for providing open-source display driver support for VIA's aging x86 chipsets. For years now OpenChrome development has been down to one developer left on the project, Kevin Brace, and months ago he hoped to get the driver finally merged into the Linux kernel. He still holds out on those ambitions but will first aim to get basic acceleration working with a stable user-space API/ABI before mainlining.

IceWM 3.0 was released today as the latest major update to this X11 window manager that has been development since the late 90's with a particular focus on simplicity and speed.

The X.Org project "xisxwayland" is out with a new version of this simple program that can be easily called by shell scripts and other simple uses for checking to see whether the running X.Org Server is a genuine X11 server or more commonly these days an XWayland server running within a Wayland environment.

Xorgproto 2022.2 has been released as the newest version of this collection of X.Org/X11 protocols. Most notable with this rare xorgproto update is the introduction of a new extension, XWAYLAND.

The VKMS driver within the Linux kernel allows for virtual kernel mode-setting as a software-only KMS/DRM driver that can be used for virtual testing purposes and other uses around headless systems. New patches out of Google are working on ConfigFS support for this virtual display driver and from there making it easy to build out your own virtual graphics device configuration with VKMS.

Getting things started for this "Patch Tuesday" are the disclosure of two new X.Org Server vulnerabilities.

While no new X.Org "katamari" releases are planned for a collection of all the X.Org component updates combined, this weekend longtime X.Org contributor Alan Coopersmith of Oracle issued many new updates to various old, seldom-maintained X.Org projects.

While XWayland is normally used just for running root-less single applications like games within an otherwise native Wayland desktop, new patches from Red Hat that have been merged into the X.Org Server enhance XWayland's existing "root-full" mode of operation for allowing entire desktop environments and window managers to nicely function within the context of XWayland.

This weekend marked 38 years since the inaugural release of the X Window System at MIT.

This year's X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) alongside WineConf has been formally announced for this co-located event planned to happen in-person this October in Minnesota.

It's been over one month already since the release of XWayland 22.1 while this morning v22.1.1 was issued with a handful of bug fixes.

The Cairo graphics library that is used by GNOME/GTK, Mozilla Gecko, and many other projects for vector-based 2D graphics drawing has decided to remove a number of its old drawing back-ends.

Libinput 1.20 is out today as the first update since last September to this widely-used Linux input handling library that is relied on both within X.Org and Wayland powered desktops.

Libinput 1.19 launched last September with high resolution scroll wheel support finally in place while libinput 1.20 is in preparation for release that improves that functionality. Libinput 1.20 also makes other improvements to this widely-used input library on the Linux desktop that is leveraged by both X.Org and Wayland based environments.

While many Linux enthusiasts like to cite Linux's stellar support for older hardware platforms, in reality that isn't always the case. For instance with many old X.Org user-space mode-setting drivers for powering old graphics cards at least for display purposes, they can no longer even build with with modern toolchains / software components. Given the lack of bug reports around such issues, there are very likely few users trying some of these vintage hardware combinations.

For the past several years the X.Org Foundation has been part of Software in the Public Interest (SPI) but are now considering other possible arrangements moving forward.

The race is on for delivering XWayland 22.1 in time for the spring Linux distribution releases with at least Fedora Workstation 36 expected to carry this updated package for allowing X11 clients to work atop Wayland compositors.

It's been almost one year already since the last XWayland standalone feature release separate from the X.Org Server codebase itself while now the next feature installment will soon be out.

Following yesterday's disclosure of four new X.Org Server security vulnerabilities that could lead to local privilege escalation, X.Org Server 21.1.2 is now available with those security fixes plus other changes.

Given the age of the X.Org/X11 code-base security issues have become quite frequent. It was nearly a decade ago that the X.Org Server was considered a "security disaster" and a security researcher saying it's even worse than it looks. Today another batch of X.Org Server security vulnerabilities have been made public.

Along with XWayland touchpad gestures, another shiny feature was merged this week into X.Org Server Git for XWayland: DRM leasing support!