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X.Org Releases First Modular Source Roll-Up

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the not-to-be-confused-with-the-fruit-variety dept.

NewsForge is reporting that X.Org has released their first modular roll-up release. From the article: "All X11R7.0 derivative ("modularized") releases divide the source code into logically distinct modules, separately developed, built, and maintained by the community of X.Org developers. This concentrates and accelerates development time, supporting continuous modification, testing, and publication of each module.The new modular format offers focused development, and rapid and independent updates and distribution of tested modular components as they are ready, freed from the biennial maintenance release timetable."

3 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good thing! by r_jensen11 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The major drivers that most users have issues with are with the proprietary video drivers, though. We can only hope that this will help us get driver updates as fast as Windows users, but we have no idea if ATI and nVidia are actually going to help the end-users any more than they currently do.

    I think the main thing that this will allow us to do is have more features added/modified, rather than more/newer drivers.

  2. Accelerated Indirect GLX! Woowoo. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Accelerated indirect GLX has been a until recently been a unattainable holy grain for a long time now in regards to X.

    What this will allow you to do would be allow users to gain some benifits from having hardware acceleration for 3d and multimedia application even when running applications remotely over a network.

    Another way to put it is that applications gain their acceleration not from the hardware directly, but from the Xserver they are running on, which then itself then uses the hardware acceleration.

    It's not going to be as fast or efficient as direct rendering, but it's much more flexible and usefull in a wider context.

    It is another stepping stone to having a fully realised opengl-based X server.

    This is probably very much due to Redhat's AIGLX specificly and xgl development in general.

  3. Re:Why not scrap X by Eric+Smith · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I realize that redesigning the rendering system will be arduous and time consuming. But I think it wold be nice if the *nix rendering system would advance past the 70's.
    How about explaining exactly what is wrong with the X rendering system, rather than just complaining about it? Are you talking about Xlib? There are certainly better APIs already available, such as Cairo.

    X seems to work OK for me, and doesn't seem substantially less functional than the Windows or Mac OS models.