X.Org's Indirect GLX State Is Frightening Researchers

Researchers and scientists appear up in arms this week over the state of Indirect GLX (IGLX) in the X.Org Server and the potential they'd lose the remote OpenGL rendering support they've been accustomed to using for seeing visualizations from clusters / super-computers on their workstations.

This Apple X11-users thread ignited the concerns by those relying upon Indirect GLX that they may no longer be able to use it in the future. That in turn spawned the IGLX going away? Panic! and another about Remote OpenGL.

IGLX isn't being killed off at this time, but rather it was disabled by default and that news is now reaching users. X.Org developers disabled it by default for security reasons. In fact, that change was made back in 2014 but only now is that xorg-server code reaching users on platforms where they care about the functionality. Adam Jackson has since sought to clear up the confusion over the IGLX support still being found in the xorg-server just that it needs to be manually enabled (via +iglx).

He also added a IndirectGLX xorg.conf option for more easily enabling IGLX support for those that rely upon this functionality. The IndirectGLX option is currently queued up for X.Org Server 1.19 but this flag will be back-ported to currently supported stable series if you want to use it over a command-line switch.