Since I keep getting asked about this, an update on current status:
- We'd said we were skipping Xorg 1.4 and waiting for Xorg 1.4.1 which
should fix many of the known bugs and which was supposed to be out in
early November. 1.4.1 still hasn't shipped, and has a list of known
blocker bugs that aren't fixed yet - most notably one the release
manager describes as "a staggering memory leak":
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=xorg-server-1.4.1
We're still waiting for 1.4.1, and are focusing on integrating the
client libraries and applications from X11R7.3 for the Indiana
release now.
- The feature from Xorg 1.4 with the most demand is Mesa 7.0.2, for the new
OpenGL features and for the 3D support for newer Intel graphics beyond
what we already support. Stefan has taken the GLX module changes from
1.4 and applied them to our 1.3 tree so that we can build 1.3 with Mesa
7.0.2 and Sun's DRI team is testing those now.
- We still need to take time to evaluate what's needed for Dbus, HAL &
libpixman for Xorg 1.4 integration before that happens, and haven't yet.
- X.Org has slipped the X11R7.4/Xorg 1.5 release to May - but that one's
going to be another challenge, since right now, most of the video drivers
are broken by the move to libpciaccess from the old PCI bus access code,
so we won't be able to upgrade unless those are all ported or we drop
support for the broken drivers (which we could only do in Nevada, not
Solaris 10).
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
Alan Coopersmith wrote in September 2007:
> Ken Mays wrote:
>> 1. Are there any issues with merging Xorg 7.3 with Nevada or SXCE/SXDE
>> releases?
>
> Unfortunately, I think this release was rushed out too soon - there is
> no platform on which you can build all the released tarballs together,
> which just seems wrong to me. We finally have all the input drivers
> building again in X.Org git, but there's a lot that need a release with
> those changes in still. (I pushed out a bunch of the fixes to the
> X.Org git masters, but having no way to test them, haven't done releases
> of the associated drivers yet.)
>
> Beyond unbuildable drivers, the other issues blocking Solaris
> integration I can think of are:
>
> 1) The driver ABI changed incompatibly - if we drop it in now,
> the nvidia driver breaks. Nvidia is working on a compatible
> release, so this shouldn't be an issue for long. (The only
> other out-of-tree drivers for Solaris I know of at this time
> are in frkit, and Casper's used to new releases breaking his
> drivers.)
>
> 2) The input hotplug stuff uses HAL & DBUS - I haven't looked much
> at this yet, but at the least it's going to take some extra work
> in preparing the ARC review to document the interaction and make
> sure we're using the right interfaces.
>
> 3) Last I checked the keyboard LED's weren't working at all, and I've
> seen mail from people on other platforms who were also still having
> this problem - a little thing, but the sort that fills our incoming
> bug queue if we don't get it fixed before integrating.
>
>> 2. What is the proposed date when moving to Xorg 7.3 ??
>
> Sometime after all the above issues are resolved and I think
> we can do so without causing regressions and complaints.
>
> Right now, I have no idea when that will be, and I've got
> higher priority tasks to work on, and don't know of anyone
> else working on it, so can't even guess.
>
> Fortunately, I can't say there's much most users will miss in
> not having this right away - there's little user visible change
> beyond what we've got now.
