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X.Org Server 1.16 Brings XWayland, GLAMOR, Systemd Integration

Posted by Unknown on from the x11-will-outlast-us-all dept.

An anonymous reader writes The much anticipated Xorg Server 1.16 release is now available. The X.Org "Marionberry Pie" release features XWayland integration, GLAMOR support, systemd support, and many other features. XWayland support allows for legacy X11 support in Wayland environments via GL acceleration, GLAMOR provides generic 2D acceleration, non-PCI GPU device improvements, and countless other changes. The systemd integration finally allows the X server to run without root privileges, something in the works for a very long time. The non-PCI device improvements mean System-on-a-Chip graphics will work more smoothly, auto-enumerating just like PCI graphics devices do. As covered previously, GLAMOR (the pure OpenGL acceleration backend) has seen quite a bit of improvement, and now works with Xephyr and XWayland.

16 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. Systemd? Not on my system... by gweihir · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I really hope it is not a requirement and will never be on for X.org. Otherwise, I will end up having to make my Linux-servers X-less and probably use Windows as terminal. After all, with systemd, windows-like levels of intransparency, insecurity, complexity and developer arrogance have already been reached. One system with that is quite enough, I do not need to deal with that crap on Linux as well.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    1. Re:Systemd? Not on my system... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Anyone thinking about defending systemd should read this.

      Mod parent up.

    2. Re:Systemd? Not on my system... by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Systemd vs init: It's a Swiss Army knife vs a chef's knife. A shiny abomination that does "everything" complexly and half-assed, vs a simple tool that does one thing very very well.

    3. Re:Systemd? Not on my system... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Systemd definitely solves a problem that exists. Unfortunately, it solves it in the same way that a nuclear warhead solves the problem of rat infestation.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    4. Re:Systemd? Not on my system... by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The juxtaposition of your post and sig "Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it." has me ROFLing. Systemd is, indeed, just like the spam skit - it's in EVERYTHING, and everybody gets stuck with it, even though nobody wants it. In the same way that spam isn't really FOOD, it's just on your plate, systemd isn't UNIX, it's just on your system.

    5. Re:Systemd? Not on my system... by gweihir · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Emacs never tried to crush vi. Systemd is trying to crowd out all other init-systems and to remove choice from the user. That is a bit different.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    6. Re:Systemd? Not on my system... by gweihir · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I like this analogy! The reason I use Linux is that I like excellent, simple and clear tools which are decidedly "user serviceable parts inside". I do mess with the init-system in occasion, and some of my hacks have been reliable with the traditional init for more than a decade now. The systemd answer to that is "submit a patch", in C no less and if they do not like it (which is standard), have it rejected. How that can be viewed as an improvement is beyond me.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    7. Re:Systemd? Not on my system... by gweihir · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The main beef I have with it is the "embrace-and-extend" cancer-like model that is used to push it on people by. If it were just a cultured, friendly alternative, but anybody not wanting to use it could easily be without it, I would have no problem with it at all. Instead it is a clear, uncultivated power-grab in the Linux-sphere and that is not good at all.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    8. Re:Systemd? Not on my system... by DeHackEd · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Here's a true story. I was in a CentOS 7 system via chroot and trying to troubleshoot some problems. If it were CentOS 6 I would just run "service rsyslog start" and have syslog running in the chroot so I can get the diagnostics I was expecting, but since systemd wasn't actually running I couldn't do that. I had to launch rsyslog directly by command-line, but then it didn't listen on /dev/log like it's supposed to and I had no logging. After all, it's systemd integrated now and gets its listen socket a different way. And this is just the most recent incident.

      Systemd may be technically better than sysvinit but the latter is just shell scripts which are sufficiently independent of anything else and just work. Systemd takes over your machine and wants to get its hands into everything to the point that you can't even use it anymore without systemd. This is what we're worried about what will happen to X.Org and other software.

    9. Re:Systemd? Not on my system... by gweihir · · Score: 4, Informative

      I think the analogy is completely valid. Sure, closed source is even more effective at embrace & extend and at forcing technology on users they do not want, but the same principle applies here.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  2. Re:Soon... by rujasu · · Score: 5, Funny

    Why are you writing numbers in binary?

  3. What about non-Linux users? by armanox · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So, to me it sounds like they are moving to being Linux only. As someone who supports multiple UNIX flavors (AIX, Solaris, HP UX, IRIX, and FreeBSD), all of which are running some form of X (and several of them running X.Org), I am displeased with the trend towards all of the primarily Linux dependencies for a lot of software - GNOME 3, Wayland, and now features of X11.

    --
    I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
  4. As a primarily linux user: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I can tell you I feel similiarly.

    But until and unless a large percentage of the community starts coughing up money to directly pay devs otherwise, they're going to do what their corporate masters (primarily redhat, but also other tech incumbents) choose to do.

    It's the same reason lots of other tech has made it into the linux kernel but taken years to a decade to make it into BSD. If the community isn't ponying up the cash to keep the development in a direction they desire, then some corporation will coopt it and pervert it into something we hate.

    It's not the first nor last piece of software we'll see this happening with.

  5. So... by warrax_666 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So what particular one thing does SysV init do well in your opinion? I honestly can't think of a single thing. It's crappy at managing services, it's crappy at running shell scripts (as witness by the non-standardness of init.d scripts), it's shit at managing running services with interdependencies (inittab), it's shit at dynamically reconfiguring systems (e.g. network reconfiguration for Wifi.), etc. etc.

    There's a reason alternatives were created, y'know.

    --
    HAND.
  6. Re:So... by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's crappy at managing services,

    init doesn't manage services. Services are either managed by inetd or by themselves. init only has to start the services.

    it's crappy at running shell scripts (as witness by the non-standardness of init.d scripts),

    That's proof of how good it is at running shell scripts. It just runs the script.

    it's shit at managing running services with interdependencies (inittab)

    Init doesn't need to be good at that. You can use a tool to create your runlevels which can figure it out. The only problem I see is the lack of parallelism. I suspect that this could have been fixed without replacing init.

    it's shit at dynamically reconfiguring systems (e.g. network reconfiguration for Wifi.),

    Why in the love of all that is Unix would you expect init to handle network configuration? Its job is to start and stop things, not to reconfigure your NIC. This mindset is exactly how we got systemd when we didn't really need it. We should have been able to use selinux to run X without root.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  7. GNU/Linu-x not GNOME/Lenna-x by knorthern+knight · · Score: 4, Funny

    Is Lennart paid by Redhat or by Microsoft?

    --

    I'm not repeating myself
    I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user