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Developer(s) | X.Org Foundation |
---|---|
Initial release | 6 April 2004 [1] |
Stable release | |
Repository | |
Written in | C |
Operating system | Cross-platform |
Size | 3.7 MiB [3] |
Available in | English |
Type | Display server |
License | MIT License |
Website | x |
X.Org Server is the free and open-source implementation of the X Window System (X11) display server stewarded by the X.Org Foundation.
Implementations of the client-side X Window System protocol exist in the form of X11 libraries, which serve as helpful APIs for communicating with the X server. [4] Two such major X libraries exist for X11. The first of these libraries was Xlib, the original C language X11 API, [5] but another C language X library, XCB, was created later in 2001. [6] Other smaller X libraries exist, both as interfaces for Xlib and XCB in other languages, and as smaller standalone X libraries.[ citation needed ]
The services with which the X.Org Foundation supports X Server include the packaging of the releases; certification (for a fee); evaluation of improvements to the code; developing the web site, and handling the distribution of monetary donations.[ citation needed ] The releases are coded, documented, and packaged by global developers.[ clarification needed ]
The X.Org Server implements the server side of the X Window System core protocol version 11 (X11) and extensions to it, e.g. RandR. [7]
Version 1.16.0 integrates support for systemd-based launching and management which improved boot performance and reliability. [8]
The Device Independent X (DIX) is the part of the X.Org Server that interacts with clients and implements software rendering. The main loop and the event delivery are part of the DIX. [9]
An X server has a tremendous amount of functionality that must be implemented to support the X core protocol. This includes code tables, glyph rasterization and caching, XLFDs, and the core rendering API which draws graphics primitives.
The Device Dependent X (DDX) is the part of the x-server that interacts with the hardware. In the X.Org Server source code, each directory under "hw" corresponds to one DDX. Hardware comprises graphics cards as well as mouse and keyboards. Each driver is hardware specific and implemented as a separate loadable module.
For historical reasons the X.Org Server still contains graphics device drivers supporting some form of 2D rendering acceleration. In the past, mode-setting was done by an X-server graphics device driver specific to some video controller hardware (e.g., a GPU). To this mode-setting functionality, additional support for 2D acceleration was added when such became available with various GPUs. The mode-setting functionality was moved into the DRM and is being exposed through a DRM mode-setting interface, the new approach being called "kernel mode-setting" (KMS). But the 2D rendering acceleration remained.
In Debian the 2D graphics drivers for the X.Org Server are packaged individually and called xserver-xorg-video-*. [10] After installation the 2D graphics driver-file is found under /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/
. The package xserver-xorg-video-nouveau installs nouveau_drv.so
with a size of 215 KiB, the proprietary Nvidia GeForce driver installs an 8 MiB-sized file called nvidia_drv.so
and Radeon Software installs fglrx_drv.so
with a size of about 25MiB.
The available free and open-source graphics device drivers are being developed inside of the Mesa 3D-project. While these can be recompiled as required, the development of the proprietary DDX 2D graphics drivers is greatly eased when the X.Org Server keeps a stable API/ABI across multiple of its versions.
With version 1.17 a generic method for mode-setting was mainlined. The xf86-video-modesetting
package, the Debian-package being called xserver-xorg-video-modesetting
, was retired, and the generic modesetting DDX it contained was moved into the server package to become the KMS-enabled default DDX, supporting the vast majority of AMD, Intel and NVidia GPUs.
On April 7, 2016 AMD employee Michel Dänzer released xf86-video-ati
version 7.7.0 [11] and xf86-video-amdgpu
version 1.1.0, [12] the latter including support for their Polaris microarchitecture.
There are (at least) XAA (XFree86 Acceleration Architecture), [13] EXA, UXA and SNA.
In the X Window System, XFree86 Acceleration Architecture (XAA) is a driver architecture to make a video card's 2D hardware acceleration available to the X server. [14] [15] It was written by Harm Hanemaayer in 1996 and first released in XFree86 version 3.3. It was completely rewritten for XFree86 4.0. [16] It was removed again from X.Org Server 1.13.
Most drivers implement acceleration using the XAA module. XAA is on by default, though acceleration of individual functions can be switched off as needed in the server configuration file (XF86Config
or xorg.conf
).
The driver for the ARK chipset was the original development platform for XAA.
In X.Org Server release 6.9/7.0, EXA was released as a replacement for XAA, as XAA supplies almost no speed advantage for current video cards. EXA is regarded as an intermediate step to converting the entire X server to using OpenGL.
Glamor is a generic, hardware independent, 2D acceleration driver for the X server that translates the X render primitives into OpenGL operations, taking advantage of any existing 3D OpenGL drivers. [17] In this way, it is functionally similar to Quartz Extreme and QuartzGL (2D performance acceleration) for Apple Quartz Compositor.
The ultimate goal of GLAMOR is to obsolete and replace all the DDX 2D graphics device drivers and acceleration architectures, thereby avoiding the need to write X 2D specific drivers for every supported graphic chipset. [18] [19] [20] Glamor requires a 3D driver with support for shaders. [21]
Glamor performance tuning was accepted for Google Summer of Code 2014. [22] Glamor supports Xephyr and DRI3, [23] and can boost some operations by 700–800%. [24] Since its mainlining into version 1.16 of the X.Org Server, development on Glamor was continued and patches for the 1.17 release were published. [25]
There is a distinct and special DDX for instances of the X.Org Server which run on a guest system inside of a virtualized environment: xf86-video-qxl, a driver for the "QXL video device". SPICE makes use of this driver though it works without it as well.
In the Debian repositories it is called xserver-xorg-video-qxl, cf. https://packages.debian.org/buster/xserver-xorg-video-qxl
Under Debian, drivers related to input are found under /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/
. Such drivers are named e.g. evdev_drv.so
, mouse_drv.so
, synaptics_drv.so
or wacom_drv.so
.
With version 1.16, the X.Org Server obtained support for the libinput library in form of a wrapper called xf86-input-libinput
. [26] At the XDC 2015 in Toronto, libratbag was introduced as a generic library to support configurable mice. [27] [28] xserver-xorg-input-joystick
is the input module for the X.Org server to handle classic joysticks and gamepads, which is not meant for playing games under X, but to control the cursor with a joystick or gamepad. [29] [30]
The X.Org Server, and any x-client, each run as distinct processes. On Unix/Linux, a process knows nothing about any other processes. For it to communicate with another process, it is completely and utterly reliant on the kernel to moderate the communication via available inter-process communication (IPC) mechanisms. Unix domain sockets are used to communicate with processes running on the same machine. Special socket function calls are part of the System Call Interface. Although Internet domain sockets can be used locally, Unix domain sockets are more efficient, since they do not have the protocol overhead (checksums, byte orders, etc.).
X.Org Server does not use D-Bus.
Sockets are the most common interprocess communication (IPC) method between the processes of the X server and its various X clients. It provides the Application Programming Interface (API) for communication in the TCP/IP domain and also locally only in the UNIX domain. There are several other APIs described in the X Transport Interface, for instance TLI (Transport Layer Interface). Other options for IPC between for the X client-server, require X Window system extensions, for instance the MIT Shared Memory Extension (MIT-SHM).
Multi-seat refers to an assembly of a single computer with multiple "seats", allowing multiple users to sit down at the computer, log in, and use the computer at the same time independently. The computer has multiple keyboards, mice, and monitors attached to it, each "seat" having one keyboard, one mouse and one monitor assigned to it. A "seat" consists of all hardware devices assigned to a specific workplace. It consists of at least one graphics device (graphics card or just an output and the attached monitor) and a keyboard and a mouse. It can also include video cameras, sound cards and more.
Due to limitation of the VT system in the Linux kernel and of the X core protocol (in particular, how X defines the relation between the root window and an output of the graphics card), multi-seat does not work out-of-the-box for the usual Linux distribution but necessitates a special configuration.
There are these methods to configure a multi-seat assembly:
The utilized command-line options of the xorg-server are:
-isolateDevice bus-id
Restrict device resets (output) to the device at bus-id. The bus-id string has the form bustype:bus:device:function (e.g., 'PCI:1:0:0'). At present, only isolation of PCI devices is supported; i.e., this option is ignored if bustype is anything other than 'PCI'.vtXX
the default for e.g. Debian 9 Stretch is 7, i.e. by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F7 the user can switch to the VT running the xorg-server.Only the user on the first monitor has the use of vt consoles and can use Ctrl+Alt+Fx to select them. The other users have a GDM login screen and can use xorg-server normally, but have no vt's.
Even though a single user can utilize multiple monitors connected to the different ports of a single graphics card (cf. RandR), the method which is based on multiple instances of the xorg-server seems to require multiple PCI graphics cards.
It is possible to configure multi-seat employing only one graphics card, but due to limitations of the X protocol this necessitates the usage of X Display Manager Control Protocol XDMCP. [37]
There is also Xdmx (Distributed Multihead X).
The modern X.Org Foundation came into being in 2004 when the body that oversaw X standards and published the official reference implementation joined forces with former XFree86 developers. [43] X11R6.7.0, the first version of the X.Org Server, was forked from XFree86 4.4 RC2. [1] The immediate reason for the fork was a disagreement with the new license for the final release version of XFree86 4.4, but several disagreements among the contributors surfaced prior to the split. Many of the previous XFree86 developers have joined the X.Org Server project.
In 2005, a great effort was put in the modularization of the X.Org server source code, [44] resulting in a dual release by the end of the year. The X11R7.0.0 release added a new modular build system based on the GNU Autotools, while X11R6.9.0 kept the old imake build system, both releases sharing the same codebase. Since then the X11R6.9 branch is maintained frozen and all the ongoing development is done to the modular branch. The new build system also brought the use of dlloader standard dynamic linker to load plugins and drivers, deprecating the old own method. As a consequence of the modularization, the X11 binaries were moving out of their own /usr/X11R6
subdirectory tree and into the global /usr
tree on many Unix systems.
In June 2006, another effort was done to move the X.Org server source codebase from CVS to git. [45] Both efforts had the long-term goal of bringing new developers to the project. In the words of Alan Coopersmith: [46]
Some of our efforts here have been technological - one of the driving efforts of the conversions from Imake to automake and from CVS to git was to make use of tools developers would already be familiar and productive with from other projects. The Modularization project, which broke up X.Org from one giant tree into over 200 small ones, had the goal of making it possible to fix a bug in a single library or driver without having to download and build many megabytes of software & fonts that were not being changed.
In the 7.1 release, the KDrive framework (a small implementation of X written by Keith Packard, which was not based on XFree86 that X.Org developers used as a testing ground for new ideas, such as EXA) was integrated into the main codebase of X.Org server.
In 2008, the new DRI2, based on the kernel mode-setting (KMS) driver, replaced DRI. This change also set a major milestone in the X.Org server architecture, as the drivers were moved out from the server and user space (UMS) to the kernel space.
In 2013, the initial versions of DRI3 and Present extensions were written and coded by Keith Packard to provide a faster and tearing-free 2D rendering. By the end of the year the implementation of GLX was rewritten by Adam Jackson at Red Hat. [47]
Version | Date | X11 Release | Main features |
---|---|---|---|
1.0 | 21 December 2005 [48] | X11R7.0 (1.0.1) | Initial modularized X server, EXA architecture |
1.1 | 22 May 2006 [49] | X11R7.1 (1.1.0) | KDrive integration, AIGLX support [50] |
1.2 | 22 January 2007 [51] | X11R7.2 (1.2.0) | Autoconfiguration, enhanced support for GL-based compositing managers [52] |
1.3 | 19 April 2007 [53] | RandR 1.2 [54] | |
1.4 | 6 September 2007 [55] | X11R7.3 (1.4.0) | Input hotplugging support [55] [56] |
1.5 | 3 September 2008 [57] | X11R7.4 (1.5.1) | MPX [58] |
1.6 | 25 February 2009 [59] | RandR 1.3, DRI2, XInput 1.5 [60] | |
1.7 | 1 October 2009 [61] | X11R7.5 (1.7.1) | XInput 2.0, multi-pointer X [62] [63] |
1.8 | 2 April 2010 [64] | xorg.conf.d, udev input handling [65] | |
1.9 | 20 August 2010 [66] | X11R7.6 (1.9.3) | |
1.10 | 25 February 2011 [67] | X Synchronization Fences [68] | |
1.11 | 26 August 2011 [69] | ||
1.12 | 4 March 2012 [70] | X11R7.7 (1.12.2) | XInput 2.2 (including multi-touch support) [71] |
1.13 | 5 September 2012 [72] | New DDX driver API, DRI2 offload, RandR 1.4, OpenGL 3.x+ contexts, removing XAA [73] | |
1.14 | 5 March 2013 [74] | XInput 2.3 [75] | |
1.15 | 27 December 2013 [76] | DRI3 and Present extensions [77] [78] | |
1.16 | 17 July 2014 [79] | XWayland DDX, GLAMOR acceleration, non-PCI devices support, systemd-logind support (rootless X), [79] [80] obtained support for the libinput library in form of a wrapper called xf86-input-libinput [81] [82] | |
1.17 | 4 February 2015 [83] | Integration of the former xf86-video-modesetting generic DRM/KMS driver, [84] [85] added support for DRI2 with GLAMOR | |
1.18 | 9 November 2015 [86] | RandR 1.5 | |
1.19 | 15 November 2016 [87] | Threaded Input, PRIME synchronization, XWayland pointer confinement and warping, Windows DRI extension support [88] | |
1.20 | 10 May 2018 [89] | Meson build system improvements, GLXVND allows for distinct OpenGL drivers for different X screens, RandR leasing improves Steam VR support | |
21.1 | 27 October 2021 [90] | Meson build system now on par with Autotools, Variable refresh rate support, touchpad gestures via XInput 2.4 | |
Legend: Old version, not maintained Old version, still maintained Latest version Future release |
The X Window System is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems.
XFree86 is an implementation of the X Window System. It was originally written for Unix-like operating systems on IBM PC compatibles and was available for many other operating systems and platforms. It is free and open source software under the XFree86 License version 1.1. It was developed by the XFree86 Project, Inc. The lead developer was David Dawes. The last released version was 4.8.0, released December 2008. The last XFree86 CVS commit was made on May 18, 2009; the project was confirmed dormant in December 2011.
XQuartz is an open-source version of the X.Org X server, a display server for the X Window System that runs on macOS. It formally replaced Apple's internal X11 app. The name "XQuartz" derives from Quartz, part of the macOS Core Graphics framework, to which XQuartz connects these applications. XQuartz allows cross-platform applications using X11 for the GUI to run on macOS, many of which are not specifically designed for macOS. This includes numerous scientific and academic software projects.
freedesktop.org (fd.o), formerly X Desktop Group (XDG), is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free-software desktop environments for the X Window System (X11) and Wayland on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. Although freedesktop.org produces specifications for interoperability, it is not a formal standards body.
The X.Org Foundation is a non-profit corporation chartered to research, develop, support, organize, administrate, standardize, promote, and defend a free and open accelerated graphics stack. This includes, but is not limited to, the following projects: DRM, Mesa 3D, Wayland, and the X Window System and its primary implementation, the X.Org Server.
GLX is an extension to the X Window System core protocol providing an interface between OpenGL and the X Window System as well as extensions to OpenGL itself. It enables programs wishing to use OpenGL to do so within a window provided by the X Window System. GLX distinguishes two "states": indirect state and direct state.
Keith Packard is a software developer, best known for his work on the X Window System.
The Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) is the framework comprising the modern Linux graphics stack which allows unprivileged user-space programs to issue commands to graphics hardware without conflicting with other programs. The main use of DRI is to provide hardware acceleration for the Mesa implementation of OpenGL. DRI has also been adapted to provide OpenGL acceleration on a framebuffer console without a display server running.
In computing, EXA is a graphics acceleration architecture of the X.Org Server designed to replace XAA and to make the XRender extension more usable, with only minor changes needed to adapt obsolete XFree86 video drivers written to use XAA; it was designed by Zack Rusin and announced at LinuxTag 2005 and first released with X.Org Server version 6.9/7.0.
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) is a subsystem of the Linux kernel responsible for interfacing with GPUs of modern video cards. DRM exposes an API that user-space programs can use to send commands and data to the GPU and perform operations such as configuring the mode setting of the display. DRM was first developed as the kernel-space component of the X Server Direct Rendering Infrastructure, but since then it has been used by other graphic stack alternatives such as Wayland and standalone applications and libraries such as SDL2 and Kodi.
Mesa, also called Mesa3D and The Mesa 3D Graphics Library, is an open source implementation of OpenGL, Vulkan, and other graphics API specifications. Mesa translates these specifications to vendor-specific graphics hardware drivers.
Xgl is an obsolete display server implementation supporting the X Window System protocol designed to take advantage of modern graphics cards via their OpenGL drivers, layered on top of OpenGL. It supports hardware acceleration of all X, OpenGL and XVideo applications and graphical effects by a compositing window manager such as Compiz or Beryl. The project was started by David Reveman of Novell and first released on January 2, 2006. It was removed from the X.org server in favor of AIGLX on June 12, 2008.
A free and open-source graphics device driver is a software stack which controls computer-graphics hardware and supports graphics-rendering application programming interfaces (APIs) and is released under a free and open-source software license. Graphics device drivers are written for specific hardware to work within a specific operating system kernel and to support a range of APIs used by applications to access the graphics hardware. They may also control output to the display if the display driver is part of the graphics hardware. Most free and open-source graphics device drivers are developed by the Mesa project. The driver is made up of a compiler, a rendering API, and software which manages access to the graphics hardware.
Xsun is an X Window System (X11) display server implementation included with Solaris, developed by Sun Microsystems. It replaced the older Xnews server, which supported the display of not only X11 applications, but also NeWS and SunView programs. Xsun discontinued support for these legacy environments, and added support for Display PostScript.
X-Video Motion Compensation (XvMC), is an extension of the X video extension (Xv) for the X Window System. The XvMC API allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process to the GPU video-hardware. In theory this process should also reduce bus bandwidth requirements. Currently, the supported portions to be offloaded by XvMC onto the GPU are motion compensation and inverse discrete cosine transform (iDCT) for MPEG-2 video. XvMC also supports offloading decoding of mo comp, iDCT, and VLD for not only MPEG-2 but also MPEG-4 ASP video on VIA Unichrome hardware.
nouveau is a free and open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards and the Tegra family of SoCs written by independent software engineers, with minor help from Nvidia employees.
Xephyr is a display server software implementing the X11 display server protocol based on KDrive which targets a window on a host X Server as its framebuffer. It is written by Matthew Allum. Xephyr is an X-on-X implementation and runs on X.Org Server and can work with Glamor. Future versions could make use of libinput. Replacing Xephyr with the xf86-video-dummy and xf86-video-nested drivers in the normal X.Org server is being considered as part of X11R7.8.
Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) is a royalty-free application programming interface (API) as well as its implementation as free and open-source library distributed under the MIT License. VDPAU is also supported by Nvidia.
Wayland is a communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. A display server using the Wayland protocol is called a Wayland compositor, because it additionally performs the task of a compositing window manager.
AMDgpu is an open source device driver for the Linux operating system developed by AMD to support its Radeon lineup of graphics cards (GPUs). It was announced in 2014 as the successor to the previous radeon
device driver as part of AMD's new "unified" driver strategy, and was released on April 20, 2015.
Windows X-server based on the xorg git sources (like xming or cygwin's xwin), but compiled with Visual C++ 2010.