At the X.Org Developer's Conference last week, there was a general
consensus to deprecate and remove some of X.Org's least used
extensions - several of these have only had changes in the last
decade to patch security holes found in them, others duplicate
functionality from other extensions. All cause the teams doing
security work (SE-Linux, Solaris Trusted Extensions, etc.) to
do extra work to characterize their security models and determine
what has to be done to secure them.
If there's any of these you, your products, or your users need,
now is the time to speak up on xorg at lists.freedesktop.org .
(For now, support for these is just being dropped from the X server.
The client code will remain for binary compatiblity, you'll just
find fewer servers offering the extension - but since you've never
had any guarantee of extension support, you've always tested for
them and fallen back to a safe default, right?)
Extensions already deleted from the X.Org X server master
repository (i.e. the code base that will be used for the Xorg
1.6/X11R7.5 release in the second half of CY2008 - on Solaris,
this is what we use to build the servers Xorg, Xephyr,
/usr/X11/bin/Xvfb, and Xvnc - and soon Xprt):
- TOG-CUP (Colormap Utilization Protocol) - the few places left
where 8-bit psuedocolor is absolutely required are not believed
to need this level of control over colormap allocation
- EVI (Extended Visual Information) - unused, unimplemented for most
video cards. Was originally added for OpenGL, but GLX visual
information is now used instead.
- AppGroup - leftover from the Broadway project to embed X applications
in your web browser. Never caught on since few web clients are running
on an X server, compared to how many have Java or Flash or JavaScript
support. No other known users.
- MIT-SUNDRY-NONSTANDARD - only used to enable bug compability with
X11R2 & R3, but since that support was removed in Xorg 1.2, has only
returned BadRequest to attempts to enable it since then.
Extensions under consideration for removal:
- Either XTrap or XRecord, since they seem to do the same thing.
- Either DoubleBuffer or MultiBuffer, again, duplicate functionality.
- XFree86-DGA - only the mouse portions are still relevant, so those
are likely to be folded into the new version of Xinput, and then this
extension removed completely.
- XFree86-Misc - the useful parts are mainly subsumed by Xrandr & XKB.
- XFree86-VidModeExtension - the needed functionality needs to be merged
into Xrandr, and then this too can go.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
