[Discuss] State of X

[Alan W. Irwin]

Those who are interested in free operating systems should pay attention to
what is going on with X since it is the basis of all free desktops. One
fundamental change is the serene (but slow) "Cathedral-style" X development
that occurred in the XF86 era has now been replaced by rapid but seemingly
chaotic "Bazaar-style" X development of the xorg era.  With so much going on
in X these days it is hard to keep track of the bigger picture, but the post
to the xorg list that I forward below gives some extremely useful resources
to help you get up to speed with recent X changes.

So far I have only listened to three of the talks (by Keith Packard, Carl
Worth, and Dave Airlie), but it appears to me when the dust settles about a
year from now we are going to have an X that will run without any special
root privileges (a huge improvement in security), which will have a much
better fundamental design (so that the various X components can communicate
much better between themselves), and which will take full advantage of video
chipset capabilities whether open (Intel, AMD/ATI) or reverse-engineered
(nvidia and others unless they follow Intel and AMD/ATI's lead and start
being more open about their hardware).  These advances should not only make
it much easier to do further improvements in X, but also should give a
tremendous practical boost to Linux 3D desktops and games.

Enjoy the most interesting talks referenced below.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:54:05 +1030
From: Peter Hutterer <mailinglists at who-t.net>
To: Harald Braumann <harry at unheit.net>
Cc: xorg at lists.freedesktop.org
Subject: [xorg] Re: State of X - Google Tech Talk

Harald Braumann wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:37:34 -0800
> But even as a frequent reader of this list it is hard to follow the
> development of all the new and shiny things done in and around X. Until
> smth has been released, information about what's going on is scattered
> on multiple mailing lists, irc channels, devs' personal blogs, etc.
> Also dedicated news sites of some projects are usually updated
> enthusiastically only for a short time after they have been set up.
>
> Maybe people intimately familiar with the development of X could drop a
> line now and then on this list about what's going on. I think many
> would be interested in this kind of update and the barrier to do so
> would be lower than writing an essay to be published on the web
> somewhere or maintaining some news site.


Right now, it is actually a good time to get up to speed.

Go to http://linux.conf.au/programme/presentations and watch the
following talks:
- X Acceleration That Finally Works presented by Carl Worth
- Redefining input in X presented by Peter Hutterer
- Application performance profiling with Xorg presented by Adam Jackson
- Bringing kittens back to life - continuing story of open source
graphics drivers presented by Dave Airlie
- Roadmap to recovery: Pain and Redemption in X driver development
presented by Keith Packard

There was an additional talk by Jesse and Eric at the kernel miniconf. I
don't know if this one has been videotaped and/or is available online.
- Enhancing Linux Graphics 	Jesse Barnes

I think this covers the big things going on right now.

In addition, there are XDS and XDC from last year, which have a wiki
page and summarise the talks.

http://wiki.x.org/wiki/XDC2007Notes (Feb 2007)
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/Events/XDS2007/Notes (Sep 2007)

These notes were more or less updated live, so I presume this will
happen during the next XDS/XDC too (whenever they are, I don't know)

LWN had two articles that were summaries of the above talks:
http://lwn.net/Articles/268378/ "LCA: Two talks on the state of X"
http://lwn.net/Articles/267672/ "LCA: Bringing X into a two-handed world"

And finally, there is planet.freedesktop.org, which does help in keeping
up with what's happening. To some degree anyway.

Perfect solution? No, but it is a start, and quite a good one I think.

Cheers,
    Peter
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