GLAMOR Sees More Improvements For What Will Eventually Be X.Org Server 1.21

We haven't been seeing as much GLAMOR activity these days but then again the pace of X.Org Server development has certainly slowed up in recent years. GLAMOR as a reminder allows for X.Org Server 2D acceleration to happen in a generic manner via OpenGL / GLES and has been a common area for improvement.

There hasn't been much to report on GLAMOR's development in recent months with it generally working out well already on X.Org Server 1.20, at least for desktop systems with modern OpenGL drivers. Eric Anholt of Broadcom on Wednesday landed the latest GLAMOR code into X.Org Server Git.

The code culminates with centralizing their pixmap format / type handling to just perform the necessary format checks / determinations at start-up time rather than being done redundantly in a few different areas.

This improves the situation for OpenGL ES pixmap format/type handling but also on the desktop OpenGL side is said to fix the format/type handling for depth 15 and 16 setups to use 16bpp rather than 32bpp. Over the course of a few commits, several hundred lines of GLAMOR code was reworked.

It's been nearly one year already since the X.Org Server 1.20 release but there's been no definitive timeline yet for X.Org Server 1.21 nor the start of any release/test candidates. There's been just under 300 commits so far since the X.Org Server 1.20.0 tag, most of which has been either GLAMOR work or XWayland improvements, Meson build system updates, or changes to the in-tree xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver.