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X.Org Server 1.16 Brings XWayland, GLAMOR, Systemd Integration 226

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

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  • Soon... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 17, 2014 @10:34AM (#47475189)

    there will be no usable X, at least not from X.org, outside of poetterix.

    • systemd dependency is optional in Xorg 1.16.

      It's likely that the major desktops will have switched to Wayland and deprecated X support before systemd is made a hard dependency for Xorg.

  • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday July 17, 2014 @10:43AM (#47475265)

    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.

    • Systemd vs init: It's the new emacs vs vi debate for the 21st century. :P
      • I use systemd on GobiLinux to launch Gnome3 in Wayland so I can tab-indent, via my Dvorak keyboard, the UTF-16-encoded, dynamically-typed code of my GPLed program in Emacs. While playing Oggs in Amarok2 through PulseAudio on OSS4. /nerd-troll

      • by NoNonAlphaCharsHere ( 2201864 ) on Thursday July 17, 2014 @11:09AM (#47475505)
        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.
        • Well there are advantages to systemd whether you personally like it or not. Like automatic dependency handling, parallel service starts, monitoring built-in. And there are disadvantages too.
          • by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Thursday July 17, 2014 @11:30AM (#47475711) Journal
            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.
            • 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.

              To be fair, systemd have never irradiated anyone, like Godzilla - yet.
              (Though, we should all fear the day it does...)

          • by NoNonAlphaCharsHere ( 2201864 ) on Thursday July 17, 2014 @11:37AM (#47475795)
            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.
            • by gweihir ( 88907 )

              For the reasons you describe, it is not on my system. Currently, long-term support for Debian without it looks like a temporary solution, but eventually, I think, I will have to go to Gentoo. (Unless by that time a few more distros have woken up. There may be some reason Debian now has long-term support for the last version that does not make systemd mandatory...) I need security and reliability, not "faster boot times".

              • Indeed debian has extended support for debian 6, we are on debian 7, but systemd-logind is the only thing installed.

                On the other hand it is entrenched like the monster in Alien.

                # aptitude purge libsystemd-login0

          • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday July 17, 2014 @11:53AM (#47475991)

            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.

            • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

              I would have to disagree with the analogy of embrace and extend as systemd is open source whereas MS products were not. And you can use alternatives but it may be more work to maintain them.
              • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday July 17, 2014 @01:41PM (#47477081)

                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.

              • Open source is irrelevant when a significant number of critical projects required to build a functioning graphical desktop are tied to the undesirable project. It's hard to maintain a fork as it is, but 10 forks? 20 forks? At some point the hard dependency on systemd eventually boxes in everyone.
            • Yes, there is too much political smog that surrounds it. The fights for and against it very often devolve into political squabbles. Many egos jockeying for position. So in that sense it very much has an open source culture behind it.

            • I don't think you even know what "embrace and extend" means. Odd, given your user ID. Alzheimer's? Oh, wait, I get it, it was just "flamebait."

          • However, systemd is not the only way to solve those problems. Overall it seems to have more politics than technical advantages that surround it.

            The real problem is that so many systems "require" it so that you can't escape it. If you want newer alternatives then you stick out as a subversive. The idea of simple tools that do simple things well falls by the wayside as the distros attempt to be the fastest booting things out there, or by mimicking other systems.

            • systemd is the solution that exists though, and is being standardized on.

              All of the other SysV replacements either lack the features, or have significant problems.

        • So... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by warrax_666 ( 144623 ) on Thursday July 17, 2014 @11:23AM (#47475651)

          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.

          • Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)

            by ustolemyname ( 1301665 ) on Thursday July 17, 2014 @11:30AM (#47475721)

            Totally agree. When I read his analogy it initially made sense to me, but only because I implicitly switched the order of Systemd and SysV init because that makes sense. "abomination that does "everything" complexly and half-assed" perfectly describes the hell that was init scripts.

            • by gweihir ( 88907 )

              Can the propaganda. What you claim is so obviously wrong, it is not funny anymore.

              • He's accurately describing the reasons for systemd and the reasons so many of us use it.

                He's giving the main, standard party line. It is not "propaganda," it is how people with a different view than you really feel about it.

                Compare that to your hyperbole that misrepresents the choice, and ask yourself who is producing propaganda!

          • Well init in my opinion is as the poster stated init is an excellent chef's knife. The problem is in the modern age, sometimes you need a screwdriver and sometimes you need scissors. Systemd can do all those things but it's not great at doing so. It's enough to get by.
            • IMO you have it exactly backwards on all the factual parts. I can agree that people will have different preferences, and if somebody enjoys using SysV init, great!

              But on a more factual level, it is somewhat... absurd to claim that systemd does what it does poorly. To get that view, instead of listening to SysV fans, you'd need to listen to people who wanted the systemd features, but found they didn't achieve what they claimed. And if you look around, that is not the nature of the dispute at all. The dispute

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            I don't think SysVinit is particularly good at anything, especially considering it's SysV's complete lack of functionality that caused the emergence of 9 different ways to do network config (Debian way, RHEL way, Gentoo way, and many others); 9 different ways to do logging (syslog, rsyslog, syslog-ng, etc.); and so on with starting daemons, yada yada.

            That said, I'm really somewhat disappointed that, as powerful of a unifying force within the Linux distro world Poettering's contributions have been, they comp

          • Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Thursday July 17, 2014 @11:57AM (#47476041) Homepage Journal

            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.

            • One service should do one job. The problem is that in the past people tried to lump everything onto one tool or small set of tools, and so started thinking along the lines of "what if we had just one system daemon to rule them all?" Ie, init should do init and not network configuration.

              Another problem people point to which I don't see as a problem, is a complaint that different distributions have different methods of doing the same thing. I don't see a problem with 10 different solutions to the same prob

          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            Well, there are people with different opinions about that. SysV init works very well for me and in particular lets me customize everything, which I routinely do. Now, is some people want systemd, I am completely fine with that. What I am decidedly not fine with is having systemd forced on me.

        • Systemd vs init: It's a Swiss Army knife vs a chef's knife. A shiny abomination that does "everything" complexly and half-assed,

          systemd needs improvements in many areas - I can't argue with that.

          However, it's worth noting that in my past few days of playing with CentOS 7 [bfccomputing.com], it's been tremendously faster than CentOS 6 on every workload I've been able to throw at it.

          I haven't done a deep dive to figure out why exactly, but I have noticed 'tuned' running, doing some dynamic system optimizations, it seems via sys

          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            The main improvement systemd needs is that is has to stop forcing itself on people and raping their systems. It has to be an option among many, not the "one true way". And forcing itself on people at this crappy, early stage is beyond anything I have ever seen, and can only be attributed to total disrespect for all Linux users. If systemd were stable, secure and well-documented, I would say these people were just severely misguided. This way I can only call what they are doing outright malicious.

            • yeah systemd showed up at my door with a baseball bat and demanded that I switch to a distro that uses it!

              Sorry, false alarm, it was just the pizza guy.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday July 17, 2014 @11:51AM (#47475967)

          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.

          • I'll even push the analogy a little further. Once you use (or, more likely are forced to by some other project) the tweezers from the Swiss Army knife, it FORCES you to use it as your ONLY tweezers. And your ONLY knife. And your ONLY screwdriver. And your ONLY corkscrew. And your ONLY toothpick. And your ONLY scissors. And your ONLY saw...
          • So now your real complaint comes out. They rejected your contributions because your contributions were using the old system it replaced. No, they aren't going to want to roll in your SysV init scripts. But there is compatibility with them for the users. You can still use your init scripts, and write new ones.

            You're just butthurt that they didn't accept your patch, that didn't even attempt to use the same technologies and languages that they're using. Fail.

      • by arth1 ( 260657 )

        No, generally emacs users are happy with systems that have both emacs and vi, and emacs won't prevent vi (and all the tools depending on ex/ed) from working.
        This is more like replacing ISC bind with samba domain controller. It's incomplete, broken by design, and has so many levels of abstractions that no sane person can admin it without specialized tools.

        I'm already boycotting Red Hat 7 because of the poetterification that changes simple things that work to complex things that don't. Now Xorg will have to

        • Agreed. I never saw a distribution release that said "we're replacing vi with emacs", or "X finally did the work necessary to interoperate with emacs", and no flame wars that people who still use vi are luddites holding back the advancement of Linux.

        • I use both every day. Emacs is the best code editor, and vim is the best system config editor. I've been using both for 15+ years.

          And BTW, I'm running systemd and it didn't eat my cat or whatever when I use an old SysV initscript. Actually, it has backwards compatibility for that! While I do really like systemd, I haven't converted any of my own initscripts. Mostly because I'm the only one using them. If they were in released software, well, it is normal that SysV get replaced eventually and it is a small b

      • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday July 17, 2014 @11:48AM (#47475915)

        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.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 17, 2014 @10:54AM (#47475369)

      Anyone thinking about defending systemd should read this [pappp.net].

      Mod parent up.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Anyone thinking about defending systemd should read this [pappp.net].

        Interesting read, but my "defense" of systemd is usually an "systemd could be the devil himself and you'd still sound like a paranoid asshat." I don't care if people don't want to use systemd. but shouldn't they be putting effort into collaborating on a set of remove-systemd-dependancy patches instead of bitching on the internet about the inevitable?

        • by armanox ( 826486 )

          Not really, because the systemd group is creating the issue.

        • by suutar ( 1860506 )

          We don't like thinking it's inevitable yet. We like thinking that maybe the distros that we used to use and love can be convinced to stay the way we love them instead of growing apart.

      • And why should I give a rats ass what some random blogger thinks about software? Pappp's opinion about SystemD is as relevant as the homeless person down the street.

        There will always be a Linux distribution that doesn't use systemD, if you are so adamant about not using it, don't use it instead of trying to convince everyone else it's evil because CLEARLY everyone else doesn't agree with you. You people that hate systemd are worse than "born-again's" and mormons and just like them you don't have the answer

        • by NoNonAlphaCharsHere ( 2201864 ) on Thursday July 17, 2014 @11:44AM (#47475869)
          You've got that exactly backwards. The systemd lovers are more like the people who say "I don't care WHAT the Mormons believe, as long as they accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior".
          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            Well said.

          • I get your intent but you really messed up the delivery. The Mormons do believe Jesus is their lord and savior, so arguing that someone doesn't care whatever wacky thing they believe if they support that statement would be exactly the opposite of your intended meaning because it's in fact true.

            My point is that the anti-systemD propaganda out there runs from it's all a redhat conspiracy to personal attacks on the author. Some talk about systemD violating Unix philosophy, very few talk about implementation an

      • by dbc ( 135354 )

        Great link. Very well stated.

      • True, it hits the key point that systemd is not a unix-like way of doing things. That isn't to say that it's a bad thing in itself (if you subtract out all the politics). So the question is whether you want Linux to remain a unix-like system or not.

        I haven't seriously used Linux in awhile, but it just doesn't seem much like Unix anymore, and it's not just systemd doing this.

    • by ogdenk ( 712300 )

      I'm still a little confused as to why the Linux crowd didn't just adopt launchd from Apple. It's open-source as well and while "different" it's launch scripts are readable and it does its job quite well. Personally, I prefer the old BSD rc scripts but I can tolerate launchd. Systemd looks like a far bigger mess and will end up fragmenting quite a few projects. I imagine GNOME functionality under FreeBSD will take a nosedive. systemd seems very "Un-UNIXy".

      As long as systemd support remains OPTIONAL in X

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        I completely agree to that. I do not object to systemd's existence. I disagree with the way it is forced on people. Next, it will probably try to invade libc. It already tried to mess with the kernel, but fortunately was stopped. At this time, it seems only Gentoo and Slackware have long time plans to do without it or leave it optional. Gentoo had to fork udev to make that possible. All other major distros seem to have caved to pressure and, as far as I can see, without any arguments that are based on any r

    • I've just made it back from RTFA and Phoronix is calling it "Optional systemd Support".

  • by armanox ( 826486 ) <asherewindknight@yahoo.com> on Thursday July 17, 2014 @10:56AM (#47475387) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 17, 2014 @11:00AM (#47475413)

      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.

    • by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Thursday July 17, 2014 @11:04AM (#47475449) Journal

      I am displeased with the trend towards all of the primarily Linux dependencies for a lot of software - GNOME 3, Wayland, X11

      We had a GNOME 3 dev on here a while ago. Apparently they've been working hard to get the features of GNOME3 working without systemd.

      As for X11, it also has this feature to run rootless in Windows. However, that doesn't affect me as a Linux user. I think adding integration with more systems is generally done well on Xorg.

    • Xorg continues to run fine on Solaris, since Oracle pays developers (including myself) to make sure Xorg continues to work and to contribute fixes upstream. Xorg continues to run fine on most BSD's, since BSD developers continue to contribute fixes upstream to make that happen. Of course, neither of those platforms get all the features, such as those requiring systemd/udev, because no one has stepped forward to write the code for them. The Xorg server has never run on AIX, HPUX, or IRIX, since no one who
      • by armanox ( 826486 )

        I know it never ran on IRIX - IRIX uses XSgi. The HP-UX box I currently have access to (which is horribly outdated) is running XFree86. AIX, however, does use X.Org. (BTW, IRIX wasn't EOL until the beginning of this year)

        bash-4.2$ /usr/X11R7/bin/Xorg -version

        X Window System Version 7.1.1
        Release Date: 12 May 2006
        X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0, Release 7.1.1
        Build Operating System: AIX IBM
        Current Operating System: AIX aix71 1 7 00036A2AD300
        Build Date: 07 July 2006

  • Did this dude get so excited over the release that he peed his pants? http://www.phoronix.com/image-... [phoronix.com]
    • My ass used to sweat like that when I was a teenager. Horribly embarrassing all around but there you have it. Since this image is not presented in smellovision we have no way to know for sure.

      • This is one of those situations where, you know, I'd rather NOT have a technology at hand to validate an assumption.
  • I think we've seen this strategy before.

    Basically, it's job security; make it so complex you need to pay for 'support' to make it work.

  • by knorthern knight ( 513660 ) on Thursday July 17, 2014 @05:11PM (#47478559)

    Is Lennart paid by Redhat or by Microsoft?

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