The long overdue X.Org Server 1.21 still hasn't been organized for release but at least the extra time is allowing more XWayland bits to land.

Over the past year and a half the VKMS Linux DRM driver has come together as the "virtual kernel mode-setting" implementation for headless systems and other environments not backed by a physical display. Interestingly being tacked on their TODO list now is VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) support. Separately, the prominent VKMS developer is now employed by AMD.

At the X.Org Developers Conference earlier this month Kevin Brace provided an update on the state of the OpenChrome project that he continues to single handedly push forward.

At the XDC2019 X.Org Developers Conference earlier this month in Montreal they named the location of XDC2020 in Europe.

While there is an ever increasing number of open-source developers focusing on the Linux graphics stack with the GPU drivers and related infrastructure, it's quite a different story when it comes to the Linux input side. It's basically one developer that has been working on the Linux input improvements for the past number of years.

A few days after the xf86-video-amdgpu 19.1 release, xf86-video-ati 19.1 is out as the newest X.Org driver release for older ATI/AMD graphics processors.

There is yet another significant improvement found for XWayland in the latest X.Org Server code that will hopefully see a long overdue release soon.

AMD has released a new version of their X.Org display driver.

There hasn't been a major release of the X.Org Server now in 17 months... Not because there haven't been any changes (in fact, a lot of GLAMOR and XWayland work among other fixing) but because no one has stepped up as release manager to get the next version out the door. But to workaround that, developers are looking at moving the X.Org Server to purely time-based releases and letting their continuous integration testing be the deciding factor on if a release is ready to ship.

Coming out of informal discussions from this week's X.Org Developers Conference in Montreal, a "liboutput" library has been proposed as a theoretical new library for helping to bring up Wayland compositors, X11 window managers, and anything else wanting to interface with DRM/KMS kernel interfaces.

X.Org Server 1.21's XWayland implementation has added support for the xdg-output-unstable-v1 version 3 protocol to help the likes of KDE and compositors like Sway based on WLROOTS.

While atomic mode-setting has been around for several years now and to provide a modern mode-setting interface that can test modes prior to the actual operation and reduce possible flickering during mode-setting events and also being faster, the common xf86-video-modesetting driver has at least temporarily disabled the support by default.

The VKMS virtual kernel mode-setting driver is seeing support for PRIME import added to it so this software solution can be used for helping to test multi-GPU PRIME configurations on Linux even without the hardware attached.

Adding to the changes to find with the eventual X.Org Server 1.21 release is a change from Red Hat that has been carried by Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora for years.

Version 1.14 of the libinput library for unified input handling on Linux X.Org and Wayland systems is now available.

We're less than two months out until the annual X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) and the featured presentations for this three-day event have now been announced.

In addition to the Intel DRM driver landing lots of feature code into DRM-Next for the Linux 5.4 kernel cycle coming up in September, the DRM-Misc-Next crew for collecting core infrastructure changes and work to the smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers has also been seeing new 5.4 work.

It's vintage X.Org driver week... Not only was there an S3 display driver update for that vintage hardware, but a SiS X.Org display driver update has also been released.

S3 Graphics drivers are still alive and well on Linux, well, sort of. On Thursday was the first new open-source xf86-video-s3 driver update in seven years.

Linux input expert Peter Hutterer of Red Hat shipped the much anticipated release candidate today for libinput 1.14, the open-source input handling library used by both X.Org and Wayland systems.

Longtime X.Org developer Alan Coopersmith who also maintains the X.Org stack for Oracle's Solaris has been trying to get out some updated X.Org modules with different code-bases having collected enough changes over the years to warrant new versions.

The 2019 X.Org Developers Conference for "all-things open-source graphics" is coming up at the start of October. But if you've been wanting to talk about something related to the Linux kernel, Mesa, Wayland, or related components, this week is your last chance to apply.

With the Fedora Workstation 31 feature outlook covered earlier this week, there was an interesting comment in that article by Red Hat's Christian Schaller that deserves special coverage.

With no X.Org Server 1.21 release being imminent, Red Hat's Adam Jackson today issued xorg-server 1.20.5 as a very small point release to the existing 1.20 stable series.

Merged this week to the X.Org Server code-base was an EGL-based GLX provider for helping XWayland and allowing some games to run nicely now under this X11 code-path for Wayland compositors. While not yet merged, another interesting bit of XWayland code is now under review as a merge request.

A notable improvement was merged into the "xserver" Git tree for the eventual X.Org Server 1.21 release that will improve the support for various Linux games relying on XWayland for running under a Wayland compositor.

X.Org's annual event, the X.Org Developers' Conference, is running like a well-oiled machined these days. While there are still months to go until XDC2019 in Montreal, a Call for Proposals has been issued for those wishing to speak at this annual gathering that pertains to Wayland, Mesa, libinput, Cairo, and related components as well, yes, the X.Org Server.

Work by NVIDIA to provide separate per-client vendor mappings for GLXVND were merged to X.Org Server 1.21 Git as another step towards improving the PRIME GPU offloading support when multiple GPU drivers are at play.

While formally the X.Org Server aimed to put out a new feature update every six months, in recent years they have been well off that trajectory with not much feature activity going on especially now that GLAMOR / XWayland / xf86-video-modesetting have stabilized and many Linux distributions eyeing Wayland by default. But there is now at least some little bit of interest in what's going into X.Org Server 1.21.

NVIDIA has been working on a new GLX extension to help the PRIME GPU offloading situation where multiple GPU vendors are involved and thus different OpenGL driver implementations. In particular, the proposed GLX_EXT_server_vendor_select is designed to better fit in to address PRIME GPU offloading obstacles introduced by their work on the now common GLVND OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch library.