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The State of X.Org
An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has up an article looking at the release of X Server 1.4.1. This maintenance release for X.Org, which the open-source operating systems depend upon for living in a graphically rich world, comes more than 200 days late and it doesn't even clear the BugZilla release blocker bug. A further indication of problems is that the next major release of X.Org was scheduled to be released in February... then May... and now it's missing with no sign of when a release will occur. There are still more than three dozen outstanding bugs. Also, the forthcoming release (X.Org 7.4) will ship with a slimmer set of features than what was initially planned."
selfness show up on large scale. Jumped Linux ship two years ago in favor of MacOS X, never looking back, starting to get job done, instead of another OS/DE fight won.
While I was long-time subscriber to xorg-devel and other related MLs, every holy war fought there was nailing X coffin slowly but surely. Do they still sing "network transparency out of the box" mantra every time someone suggests changing architecture ?
It's Open Source -- unlike proprietary software, we're not at the mercy of a company to dictate the release schedule or fix bugs if they get around to it. If bugs aren't fixed, it's because we failed to fix them.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
RE:"when so many other projects depend on it."
is that a good thing? it is not! i think applications that require an x-window-system should be just agnostic enough to allow for the older alternative to xorg, [eg] http://www.xfree86.org/
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I don't know whats stopping them from fixing the bugs in it.
The salient question would be: What's stopping us from fixing the bugs in it.
People aren't going to work on X because a lot of developers want to make new stuff, not fix up someone's old junk. So, the only way to get them to do it is to pay them. There's not enough money for that. Bounties are nice and all, but you really need to have a foundation with big money coming in to get the people to actually work on this stuff.
This is my sig.
I agree wholeheartedly. The current release of X is suitable and works well for me.
The "upgrade every year" mentality is the wrong one to have. They missed their date? Okay, that's fine. As long as they don't buckle under the "release schedule" mentality compromise quality. I may be naive, but I don't know any reason they would want to push/rush their next release.
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Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
On the other hand, I realize that Ubuntu is a good thing for Linux adoption because Linux needs a critical mass of people using it before it can start making inroads into the home and gaming markets. That critical mass is much larger than the number of people interested in --funroll-loops, so a system that's plug-and-play is important.
I think I'm starting to understand kind of how the 70's computer geeks felt when their friends came over asking for help with their Windows boxes.
I'm guessing that X.Org inherited an absolutely terrifying codebase from xfree86.
Simply getting xfree to compile was a chore, even on the (few and far between) stable releases.
Personally, I'm still unconvinced that X is a particularly "good idea." 15 years later, and the promises of simplicity and compatibility are still unrealized, as every single implementation of the protocol has suffered from numerous problems. Perhaps it would be best to start from scratch, and revise X11 to be a more realistic/practical specification.
Even back in 1994, it was being called the Iran-Contra of user-interfaces.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Once I badly needed one particular bug (proper video init on laptop resume) fixed . Asked about probable fix timeframe/schedule of this bug on lkml , most responses were in form "it's free, we're doing it in our spare time, so don't ask when" . Then I tried to determine if any amount of money can help, asked developers if they can pricetag bugfix/patch and how to pay them - there was no definite answer at all. Children , playing in their sandpit and bearing no responsibility for their code at all, unmotivated and unmotivateable by anything but most basic urges .
Yeah, doesn't it suck when people are safe and happy enough that they can't be bribed, and they just sit around labouring to use their talents according to their own interests and desires and sharing the things they create?
I hate that. These people need to have some shit ripped away from them so they can be bought and sold like everyone else. How else am I going to solve my problems?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Open source does not work like big business. It doesn't stagnate because there's no competition. It stagnates because people don't want to work on it. There isn't much competition for the Linux Kernel either. That doesn't slow down it's development.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
By that logic, Windows sucks because I never applied to work at Microsoft.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
Awww and people wonder why Linux isn't mainstream. I'm sorry to inform you, but X.org is one of the fundamental hurdles to be cleared before Linux can even dream of climbing out of the hole it is in. I am a huge Linux advocate, but ignorant people blaming missed release cycles on the "community" is just stupid. There are developers and users, and if the developers want to go open source they damn well need to accept that fact. Just as the user accepts that their open source project of choice may not be updated (sounds familiar huh). We're in the same boat, but don't for a second blame users for developers short comings, open source or not.
Bribery? I completely fail to see your logic here.
BattleCat needs to have a bug fixed. He approaches coders who, for free and in their spare time, code.
"Hey there, coderman. I see that you do this sort of thing for free and for fun, but what would you say to doing that coding thing that you love to do, hitting this one bug that I really need fixed, and ending up with all the satisfaction that you normally get from your work and a shiny nickel on top of it?"
"ZOMGBRIBERYYOUCALLOUSBASTARD!"
Really? Is that what you call bribery? Where I come from, bribery entails a breach of ethics. All BattleCat wanted was to add a little icing to the job that people were already doing for free in an effort to have something fixed that was a priority for him. That's about as straight-up, ethical, and non-bribery a way to get things done as I can imagine.
Ahhh, because Windows' display manager is truly amazing.
Now, let me just open an application on another machine, and show it on this one's X server... hmmm... what's that - I need to be running Windows 2008 Server, and have a terminal server license?
How about running multiple display managers, so that I can have more then one person using the machine with seperate monitors and input... no. Thought not.
I could go on, but I think you'll get the point.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
'I will pay you to make my problem your top priority' is among the many things that people are saying about how a FOSS economy is supposed to work. Paying people to do work for you that you can't/don't want to do dates back to at least the bronze age, and probably farther. I would go so far as to say that it's one of the cornerstones of civilization.
I think the OP went about it the perfect way:
Essentially, he tried to hire a programmer/programmers to fix his problem from the pool of programmers who know the code the best - the active developers. Anyone with a serious intent to fix a software problem is going to go the same route - grabbing a coder off the street isn't going to be nearly as productive as grabbing the guy who wrote it in the first place.
Martin
or new developers to tackle bite-sized portions of the stack without being overwhelmed. Anyone care to comment on whether this was done?
/didn't do/ all those gee-whiz window explodey effects?
/. story is inflammatory flamebait. Loads of pretty cool new stuff has appeared recently in X.org. Actually, IMO that's more likely why the release schedule slipped - stuff like MPX is very cool but represents very major changes.
Yes, it was - hence rapid development things like mpx, xrandr, xrender, composite xinput 2.0 and so forth. Have people really forgotten so fast that a couple of years ago linux
Really, the
Emacs' release schedule recently slipped too - but it was because they're merging ECB and window groups into Emacs 23, not because emacs devel has stopped!
Bribery, a form of pecuniary corruption, is an act usually implying money or gift given that alters the behaviour of the recipient in ways not consistent with the duties of that person or in breach of law.
Your problem here is fixing bugs in X is consistent with the duties of that person. In fact, you could even go so far as to saying writing code is consistent with the duties of that person.
What you are attempting to call bribery is what damn near everyone else in the world calls a job offer. He was attempting to hire someone, not to bribe them. If that was indeed bribery the job market would be a very scary place where employers could be convicted for making job offers for perfectly legitimate work.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Every tried running a local X server and running clients over the internet? I've done so many times and it's slow as molasses, at least when running oracle installers, which is where most of my experience comes from. Xvnc for me, thanks.
What you are attempting to call bribery is what damn near everyone else in the world calls a job offer. He was attempting to hire someone, not to bribe them. If that was indeed bribery the job market would be a very scary place where employers could be convicted for making job offers for perfectly legitimate work.
Sounds good to me. Working for money is the antithesis of integrity, and the social systems that make it necessary are constructed for the purpose of overcoming the integrity of the individual so they can be put to use like some inert tool. Personally, I consider every job I accept to be a moral compromise.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Not entirely true, IMO. Even though no money is directly involved, a team of open-source developers will still want their project to be successful over competing projects as a matter of personal pride and potential business opportunities.
If there's no competition, they have one less motivation to keep up work.
They aren't.
Well, the drivers are. But obviously at this stage they DO have to be coupled to the server for a variety of reasons, not least that no one else wants to take over.
But let's face it, twm hasn't had any major work in a long time, and the window managers we all use on a daily basis are nowhere near the X.Org codebase.
Do we really need network transparency?Yes, we do need network transparency. I use it all the time. It's a major feature. Keep your hands off my network transparency!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When displaying to a local server X uses unix domain sockets. Those are very fast, and they're caching friendly, so they compare well with other forms of inter-process communication like shared memory. If you have some evidence that network transparency is any kind of a bottleneck, I'd like to see it, but no one has been able to produce such numbers as far as I've seen.
Don't optimize before you've proven where the bottleneck is.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Considering Linux the kernel targets everything from the embedded space to the mainframe, I'd say they are.
If you're talking about the desktop space, there's really little to nothing that a user interacts with that wouldn't run on any of those platforms. Linux just happens to have the most traction (which has a multiplying effect since it encourages vendor support and attracts new developers).
A lot of Mac's success *IS* because its gui framework.
The GUI framework on the Mac is Cocoa. The equivalent of Cocoa is Gnome (or KDE). The underlying display server, the equivalent of X11, is Quartz.
it appears to be managed in frame buffer
But it isn't. OS X has the same client/server display architecture as a Gnome desktop.
with custom rom that makes sure you never see bios info -- just pretty pictures.
What you see on OS X is that the boot loader quickly throws up a gray screen to keep you from seeing the boot loader text; the text itself is still there. If you like, you can boot OS X completely in text mode, just like a Linux system.
the removal of large swaths of abstraction make it load and "talk" faster.
The OS X display server has at least as many layers of abstraction as X11. It is not intrinsically faster than X11 (if anything, it's slower). Mostly what you perceive as speed on OS X is massive amounts of backing store.
the use of pdf rendering
OS X doesn't really use PDF rendering.
and enforcing policy rather than just providing tools means that things like cut and paste work from app to app, every app.
I own several Macs. The notion that "cut and paste work from app to app, every app" is laughable, and Apple couldn't enforce that if they tried.
Furthermore, if anything, policy is determined by the GUI framework, not the display server.
That is the sort of thing that X fails on for the casual or home user.
Whatever problems you think the Linux desktop may have, they have nothing to do with X11; consistency and policy is determined by the desktop environment, not the display server.
Because starting from scratch is such a good idea - just look at Mozilla!
On Windows, when an app hangs, you can't move the freakin' hung window out of the way, because the window manager is the hung app. So they come up with a stupid button which minimizes windows, and due to the way modal dialogs work, the application pops back up in it's hung state when you click on another application. I'll take the separate window manager, thankyouverymuch.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
My personal bet is that X is overly complicated.
E.g. it takes 20-30 minutes to start doing something with Linux kernel. Entry bar is set low - many people like to participate. Needless to mention that to compile (properly configured) Linux kernel (with subset of drivers and features you really need) only few minutes. There are piles and piles of documentation and forums where you can find anything.
E.g. KDE + Qt. To compile KDE - you might need days. Or just grab precompiled binary packages. But after that you can in 5 minutes create something useful and interesting. Documentation is near perfect and complete. Also reading source code is quite easy, since most of the code is human readable.
But X is different beast. Even compiling it is challenge on itself. There is literally no documentation on its innards. There is no "Hello World" for X. There are bunch of example modules which you need to spend hours after hours to only understand where they plug into the all X mess.
I'd say main X problem is its strive to be cool and sit on all chairs. I'd say they need to scale down the project and split it into smaller independent pieces. Forget large releases (installing apt-get would help! kidding). The smaller sub-projects would have more chances attracting people, since (at least theoretically) then entry barrier would be lower.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
From my cold, dead hands! As far as I'm concerned, that "network transparency cruft" is the only compelling thing about X!
Ever try writing code for opening a window in Xlib?
Doing one's taxes is FAR simpler, the IRS rules are more logical, less complex and more sane than those for writing Xlib applications.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I agree 100%. I'm not an Xorg developer, but recently I put together a hackintosh and started playing with developing a framebuffer driver for my old Radeon X1400 Mobility. Comparing IOPCIDevice and IOFramebuffer with libpciaccess is night and day.
Firstly, and I don't really mean to be insulting here, but libpciaccess just sucks. It's a step in the right direction, but comparing this with IOPCIDevice is... well, it just doesn't speak well for the open source world. The API documentation tells the story pretty well. This is a stable API that hasn't changed in a good, long while. And why should it? It does everything you need to do to speak with a PCI device, it's easy to understand, and it works.
Secondly, IOFramebuffer. Again, an API that hasn't changed in a good, long while. It's simple, it publishes a framebuffer and lets everyone go on with their business. It completely separates modesetting and the publishing of a framebuffer from acceleration. This is a huge win.
The IOAccelerator header docs aren't published, but given what we've seen so far, we can infer that it's clean, it hasn't changed in a while, and it works. Why can't we have this sort of fundamental cleanliness accepted in the open source world? I feel like this stuff is about a decade ahead of Linux.
And the X protocol itself? Well, it sucks. I have an 802.11g network here at home, and X sessions are completely unusable over it. This is failure. It is abject, complete, utter failure. We're not talking long distances, we're talking both machines and the router all within 20 feet of each other. With compression, without compression, over ssh, not over ssh: FAIL. This is a common modern use case, gentlemen. If the X protocol fails it on a wireless home network, what the fuck is the point of it? Xlib is an anachronism. It is the single shittiest piece of the GUI development stack on Linux, and there's plenty of fail to go around. Ditch this bullshit, I beg you.
Follow the Apple model, provide a simple VESA modesetting driver and a software renderer and ship the fucking thing. Why has no one looked at the preeminent operating system for graphics professionals an said "hey, maybe these guys know what the hell they're doing? and omg, some of this stuff seems to be open source!" - I'll tell you why, not invented here syndrome. Those macfaggots created it and fuck them, we'll show 'em good with our 1980s network protocol and 600 pages of completely unreadable API documentation (joke's on you, it's out of date anyways!). How's that working out?
This unholy mess needs to be fixed if Linux is going to stand any real chance on the desktop.
I say we nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
P.S., I know this seems critical but I hope it's interpreted as constructive. In case it isn't, props to the Xegl crew, David Airlied, and the whole RadeonHD team. You guys made a driver for a wide range of modern hardware that basically anyone (if I can, you can) can read through and get an understanding of pretty easily. No simple feat. A lot of truy extraordinary developers have contributed a lot to X, and I salute their efforts and could never hope to be half the programmer that they are, but I recognize that there's only so much lipstick you can put on this pig.
>E.g. it takes 20-30 minutes to start
>doing something with Linux kernel.
That may be true in some cases...
>There are piles and piles of documentation and forums where you can find anything.
Ahah... ahaha. No. The Linux kernel is very poorly documented. Your comment should read "there's *out of date* and *useless* documentation, scattered around the internet where you will never find it."
Unless you consider the source itself documentation... which is hard to argue for a source tree that is millions of lines.
Have you guys ever actually tried Looking Glass? It doesn't stutter. There is no reason not to use Java for something like this except prejudice.
Oh, so by "X needs to fork", you meant "I have a brilliant idea that the experienced software developers working on X.org have surely not thought of, and all I need is to convince someone else to do it, and I'm going to respond to any criticism of my brilliant ideas with the insinuation that other people should do this work for me."
I have other projects to refactor, thank you. I'll leave the X.org developers to decide how best to approach their code.
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