XGL Development Opens Up

An anonymous reader writes "David Reveman has made the latest XGL source code available for download. This comes a few weeks after development of the project was criticized for being done 'behind closed doors'. There have been huge changes to XGL, the most significant being restructuring of the code, allowing XGL's GLX support to function on other drivers than the proprietary Nvidia one. Xcompmgr can currently be run under XGL with full acceleration provided that the proprietary ATI or Nvidia drivers are used. An OpenGL based compositing manager, 'Compiz' is currently in the works and a release is expected in February. David intends to get the code into freedesktop CVS as soon as possible, after which the code should eventually merge with Xorg."

Comments

huh?

[bcrowell]

Can anyone translate this into English? What is XGL and why should we care?

Re: huh?

[O_D_Evans]

This was posted a while ago on /.,can't find the original link. I did save the video demo from that article and have posted it here:

http://media.putfile.com/xgl_wanking

Re:Luminocity

[Anakron]

http://live.gnome.org/Luminocity
There. Fixed that link for you.

Not opened up

[Anonymous Coward]

To say the development of XGL opened up is to assume it was closed before, which is absolutely untrue.

Dave did major changes to XGL (as you can read in his post), and it's simply not possible to merge the code back while in the middle of a transition such as that. On top of that the X.org tree was pretty much frozen to allow the transition to modular X and the release of 7.0.

The "Novell closed XGL" conspiracy came from people with their own personal agenda against Novell (and Ximian).

Re:Unfree

[nathanh]

I think people generally misunderstand the sheer amount of work put into those proprietary graphics drivers. It's not something where you can throw a few bucks at some garage coders and turn out the same thing. These are done by large teams of highly payed developers (I think 100 developers is the right order of magnitude, plus or minus), working for years. It takes *serious* amounts of money to fund that sort of development staff, and it's not something you and me and a few other likeminded folks are going to be able to fund.

The same thing used to be said about operating systems.

Does it matter?

[Stalyn]

Does the source open during development matter? Look how much David Reveman got done by himself "behind closed doors". Really what matters is the source is available upon release to the public. Before that it doesn't really matter. The truth is the majority of the Xorg community doesn't believe in an OpenGL accelerated desktop. Look at the mailing list. The only people who do are a small group of coders who most likely do not have the time to actually achieve something worth using.

However if a company like Novell did pick up the project and paid developers to work on it full time but the source would be closed until release... well tough luck. In reality the only reason David released the code now was to get it into the Xorg tree. That way they can continue to "code-drop" to a tree that can be used by everyone, instead of kdrive which is for developers.

Also the Xorg developers seem to be concerned with Xegl which David isn't even working on. I dont care either way. Just get it done.

Yay for Complaining!

[poofyhairguy82]

I am glad to see that development opened a little. Not because I think it will speed the process up, but because I want to compile and use the newest Xgl! I am an Eye Candy addict.

Hopefully this WILL make development more transparant. The Xgl is needed for the future Linux desktop and I am glad Novell decided to play ball with everyone.

Oh course, the Xgl is still YEARS away from being shipped as the default on the desktop of a major distro. But we have to start somewhere, and people like me need the new eye candy fix!

Re:Unfree

[msormune]

Oh, just put a lid on it. Open Source R300 drivers are so far behind when compared to the official ATI drivers, it's hard mention them in the same sentence with a straight face. R300 driver is still pretty much a hack, and is very slow when compared to the binary drivers. It doesn't support RENDER extension, and OpenGL support is still also lacking. People are also complaining about lockups in a regular desktop situation and newer hardware support is also in the works (hopefully).

IT HURTS MAKE IT STOP

[Hard_Code]

"So don't worry about that."

That's sort of hard in this alphabet soup of acronyms for myriad projects and libraries.

I really really hope, and hope somebody can confirm this, that at the end of the day there is a STRONG inclination to:

* developer a SINGLE (SINGLE! (SINGLE!! (i mean it))) X server binary which can either render through hardware acceleration OR software, which can be determined dynamically at startup (through configuration or auto-detection), as well as the slew of other acronyms. A separate standalone OpenGL-only X server would be a configuration, maintenance and end-user documentation nightmare.

All this stuff sounds really really cool, but it all appears very fragmented, with each fragment dependent on some other alpha-quality fragment that has not yet been merged into anything other than a nice dream.

So I really hope all these exciting fragments get unified under a consistent X server and set of modules/libraries, instead of remaining really enticing fragments forever.