XDC 2008 Day 1 Notes: X.Org 7.4 & More

As was mentioned yesterday, the X Developers' Conference (XDC) is taking place this week at the Googleplex. There's only around 50 developers in attendance, but for everyone else there still is a flow of information to gather. A few Google employees had recorded each of the talks from the first day, however, they aren't yet available on You Tube or Google Video. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Google will be recording the X videos for the second and third days of this conference. Red Hat's Adam Jackson, however, has been summarizing the highlights of each talk in near real-time and has been uploading it to the X.Org Wiki.

On the first day of XDC 2008, Adam Jackson (X11R74 release manager) had talked about the X.Org 7.4 release status, Kevin Martin on various aspects of X.Org, a Mesa / Gallium3D overview by Tungsten's Zack Rusin, Matthew Garrett on suspend/resume support, and Ben Byer with Xquartz.

From the XDC 2008 Notes, it was discussed whether XAA (XFree86 Acceleration Architecture) support could be dropped altogether from X.Org, but it was decided against for this release as EXA for 2D acceleration still isn't ready for prime-time. Adam's talk then turned into a discussion over the quality of X.Org releases and need we say the degrading quality. The talk then turned to X.Org testing and the need for a new testing infrastructure, which the Phoronix Test Suite could very well handle.

Turning to Kevin Martin's talk, on the X.Org goals list are embracing the dynamic hot-plugging world, presenting a smooth and flicker-free experience (kernel mode-setting), seamless integration of Composite, redirected OpenGL and X-Video, and a secure X environment. Some of the major X accomplishments of recent times include RandR 1.2, DRI2, DRM and kernel mode-setting, Render acceleration, Cairo 1.6, and driver work.

Zack's Gallium3D talk appears to be mostly a repeat of what was said back at FOSDEM 2008 during the Gallium3D status update.

All of the highlights from the XDC 2008 conference can be read on the Notes Wiki page.