X.Org Server 1.17 Pre-Release "TimTam" Is Out

Keith Packard who this month left Intel's graphics team to join HP to work on "The Machine" has released a new pre-release version of X.Org Server 1.17.

X.Org Server 1.16.99.902 is codenamed "TimTam" and was tagged a short time ago in Git. No release announcement has yet to arrive by Keith.

With the X.Org Server 1.17 release being near, the changes are less exciting with being past the official feature/merge window. Found in the TimTam release are mostly bug-fixes but there's also a number of updates to the in-server xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver, renaming of Xorg.bin back to Xorg, and security fixes for the big number of security vulnerabilities revealed in December.

Among the changes to the generic mode-setting driver in this release is support for using GBM when GLAMOR supports it for buffer allocations, enabling of X-Video support when using GLAMOR acceleration, DPMS mode work, support for RandR shadow buffers, vblank synchronization when using the Present extension, and various other improvements to this hardware agnostic DDX driver.

X.Org Server 1.17 is expected to be released soon while X.Org Server 1.18 will come on a shorter cycle. The key features to xorg-server 1.17 are the GLAMOR improvements, integrating the mode-setting driver into the xserver Git tree, and various other improvements.

For those wondering about the TimTam codename to this X Server release, Tim Tam is an Australian chocolate biscuit. Keith likely encountered them on one of his LCA (Linux.Conf.Au) trips or was enjoying them a few days ago at LCA2015 in Auckland, New Zealand.