T2 Linux Restores XAA In Xorg, Making 2D Graphics Fast Again (t2linux.com) 55
Berlin-based T2 Linux developer René Rebe (long-time Slashdot reader ReneR) is announcing that their Xorg display server has now restored its XAA acceleration architecture, "bringing fixed-function hardware 2D acceleration back to many older graphics cards that upstream left in software-rendered mode."
Older fixed-function GPUs now regain smooth window movement, low CPU usage, and proper 24-bit bpp framebuffer support (also restored in T2). Tested hardware includes ATi Mach-64 and Rage-128, SiS, Trident, Cirrus, Matrox (Millennium/G450), Permedia2, Tseng ET6000 and even the Sun Creator/Elite 3D.
The result: vintage and retro systems and classic high-end Unix workstations that are fast and responsive again.
The result: vintage and retro systems and classic high-end Unix workstations that are fast and responsive again.
Erm (Score:3)
Why was it removed in the first place,
Re:Erm (Score:5, Insightful)
Year of Wayland on Linux is any minute now. Thus it's never too early to throw away the "old junk"(tm), that works and is used daily by millions, that is inevitably going to be replaced by... jam tomorrow.
What's going to happen first: Wayland or AGI?
Re:Erm (Score:5, Funny)
AGI. Because we'll need that to answer the question: Why Wayland?
Re: (Score:3)
AGI. Because we'll need that to answer the question: Why Wayland?
42
Re: Erm (Score:2)
I believe 12 would be a better answer, in this particular case.
Re: (Score:2)
Why Wayland?
To disrupt X.org which disrupted Xfree86, which disrupted... never mind.
Honestly, I think X.org was just getting too successful, so it was cancelled.
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I missed it.
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I'm sure you'll figure it out when more and more things stop supporting Xorg. As much as Slashdotters want to, it's not something that can be ignored.
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Already fixed with Wayback. Native Wayland apps can have a compositor stub that just connects them to the X11 system.
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That sounds like a move worthy of Microsoft or Apple. Enshittify the old reliable so people have to "upgrade" to the new shiny.
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Re: (Score:1, Troll)
The usability of Linux as a desktop has markedly degraded in the past decade, largely due to the efforts of the Wayland team. It keeps getting more bloated and less useful. It's a travesty.
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I'm certain they're being paid by the competition to do this.
Re:Erm (Score:5, Interesting)
Because an alarmingly high number of developers believe that, if code isn't being changed, it's dead. And dead code is "VuLNeRaBle".
Have you ever tried anything in Python or JS? Breaking changes are the norm. And if the app broke, it's YOUR FAULT for not reading the changelog, not their fault for changing the API for no good reason (so many changes in JS for "consistency", like, someone developed something and spelled it "colour" and 3 versions later some dev is incredibly irritated that the rest of the spelling of the app is in american english, so they "fix" it for consistency. Yes, they broke thousands of apps out there that had been running for years, but, isn't it nice how the code is now all consistent?
And don't let me get started on shit like React Router, which, last time i checked was in V6 and every version was a full rewrite, completely incompatible with the previous version - because of conceptually different behavior. Imagine doing this SIX TIMES in less than a decade.
I can understand: Color vs Colour (Score:3)
Ouch, I can definitely see wanting to fix the color/colour thing for consistency. Reminds me of a game on steam with ONE broken achievement. Digging into it, the developer misspelled the achievement originally - then on the LAST update, fixed the spelling in the code, but not in the hook. one character edited in binary and the achievement popped.
But I'd think that an alias would work - allow people expecting color to spell it that way, but not break already developed apps that used the old colour.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Because an alarmingly high number of developers believe that, if code isn't being changed, it's dead. And dead code is "VuLNeRaBle".
Well yes. ... No really you don't believe that? Software development on critical platforms is forever a cat and mouse game between finding bugs and fixing them. There's no such thing as perfection, even in ancient well tested code. Purging code barely in use is generally a good security practice, it lowers an attack surface. That's just ... obvious, and your facetious tone makes me wonder if you have any concept of security at all.
That said your comparison to Python or JS is just stupid. We're not talking a
Re: Erm (Score:4, Insightful)
Purging code barely in use is generally a good security practice, it lowers an attack surface. That's just ... obvious, and your facetious tone makes me wonder if you have any concept of security at all.
It's not obvious to anyone who lives out in the real world where niche corner cases are often only documented in "rarely used code."
Theoreticians with empty and spotless desks just love to rewrite stuff and reinvent the wheel. It's how they justify their existence.
Security against hypothetical attacks on code running several layers deep behind firewalls and/or airgaps is the excuse given for why my corporate issued managed workstation spontaneously reboots itself every week. After all...it's not bad to brick my machine when I'm using it--what's bad is not having the latest version of poo emojies in powerpoint.
Re:Erm (Score:4, Insightful)
Purging code barely in use is generally a good security practice
The problem is the common practice of confusing, "I don't use it" with "Nobody uses it" or "Nobody should use it". Breaking things that many people use is also bad practice.
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Kinda like when the Wayland developers swore blind that NOBODY actually used X over a network connection.
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Or swore that no one used window placement.
A reminder (Score:2)
From a user standpoint, network transparency is possible with waypipe with all the same caveats and limitations of using it with modern X11-compatible software. People right now can directly compare the two and see they are both equally hobbled for anything built in the last decade. If all you want to run is a bunch of GTK+ or early GTK2 software standalone over an SSH session, then X11 will still have an advantage, but that
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BZZZT!!
Excuses, excuses. Waypipe didn't exist at the time, even as a concrete implementation plan. The Wayland developers swore blind that nobody runs an app on one machine that displays on another. Mostly because Wayland had no way to do that.
From a user perspective I don't give a flying fuck if it's technically network transparent or if the client is flinging rendered images for my machine to display. What I care about is the functionality. I am here, the server is way over there, and for whatever reason,
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The Wayland developers swore blind that nobody runs an app on one machine that displays on another.
[Citation Required]
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Kinda like when the Wayland developers swore blind that NOBODY actually used X over a network connection.
Except precisely no one said that. Not a single Wayland developer, heck not even Wayland proponents from the unwashed masses said that. Stop making shit up. What they actually said was that on a modern desktop X.11 reverts to rasterizing the client and sending it to the server and that network transparency at a protocol level is virtually unused due to how any modern desktop window managers work. Most people don't even understand what they were talking about, and I suspect you are among them.
They specifical
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It was said right here on /. to me. Over and over. Nobody gives a flying rats ass if it's rasterized images or low level drawing commands and you know it. They care if they can ssh to a remote machine, run a GUI app, and have it displayed locally without a hassle.
I don't use Wayland. Now if it's proponents would just stop trying to kill the GUI I do use, all would be well. But they keep wanting to embrace, extend, and extinguish anything that speaks X11. Perhaps they should just not use X rather than vandal
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I think you'll find that there's no confusion over who uses literally 25-30 year old hardware to run a modern version of x.org. I certainly agree about your comment for other cases, but really at some point people need to let go.
That said here we have a perfect example of open source in action. If someone wants to maintain something, wants to provide those necessary security updates, wants to test the hardware, then more power to them. That however should not be a mandatory thing that falls on primary devel
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On the contrary. Old code that has had the bugs found and removed over the years probably doesn't have many left (but you can never be sure). But the new code written yesterday has plenty. Perhaps in 10 years, the worst of them will be found and squashed, but then it's old code and must be replaced.
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Cool story. There is no new code here in a discussion of obsolescence and abandonment. You're making a false equivalency here.
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The beauty of AI-generated code is that you can now generate bespoke code with zero dependencies. And if your requirements change, the AI can just rewrite it again. Libraries have always been an abstraction to allow busy programmers to make changes with minimal rewrites, enabling them to "stand on the shoulders of giants" as it were... but those giants have all been subsumed by an LLM that can just spit out a function that does one thing and one thing only. So maybe, hopefully, the sort of dependency hell y
Re: Erm (Score:3)
You're missing the bit about libraries being safer than coding your own version in certain cases. LLMs make this worse, not better.
Re: Erm (Score:2)
Claude code is beta testing the ability to check your code for vulnerabilities and possible exploits.
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This is why you shouldn't write anything in javascript or python, anymore.
It's not sustainable because the languages are not stable. The only thing that makes it tenable is being able to throw LLMs at it to keep up.
And at that point, just use a more stable, performant, useful language like go, C/C++, or rust.
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actually, Javascript IS a stable language. they have maintained compatibility with every quirk in the language.
It's the "ecosystem" built around it that has a completely different philosophy
Re: Erm (Score:2)
Python was the tcl/tk thing wasn't it?
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The move fast and break stuff mantra of many web developers has left us with a lot of broken stuff.
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https://xorg-devel.x.narkive.c... [narkive.com]
Nice read.
Re: Erm (Score:3)
Re: Erm (Score:4, Informative)
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Why was it removed in the first place,
I do not know why it was removed from linux. But the same phenomena happened on Windows. I do not remeber if it was on Vista or 7, but around that timeframe. Which makes me suspect there is a technical reason behind doing it.
I guess it has something to do with 3D-rendered Desktop environments not being able to leverage said functions.
Re:Erm (Score:5, Informative)
> Why was it removed in the first place,
Per [github.com] Rene:
Here's a commit [github.com] for XAA support in T2 Linux for others who are interested. I hope Rene has time to push it up to XLibre since it seems like the Xorg people are going to steamroll Wayland if they can and the XLibre fork will be the only surviving X11 server. Obviously it would be best if every distro could run on older hardware and Wayland is likely a poor choice for vintage computing.
I didn't know about T2 Linux and it really looks fantastic - I thought NetBSD was my only choice on some of those machines. Some of the screenshots feature WindowMaker, the spiritual successor to NeXTStep, which ran on an '030 and 2D video so this all makes perfect sense.
Those machines were perfectly usable and we can actually afford, today, the amount of RAM they used.
T2 (Score:3)
I had no idea we had the Terminator writing Linux software now.
Re:T2 (Score:4, Funny)
I strongly suggest people submit any bug reports anonymously.
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I had no idea we had the Terminator writing Linux software now.
Overheard: "Your code, give them to me."
Re:T2 (Score:4, Interesting)
I had no idea we had the Terminator writing Linux software now.
I think that you might be confusing the term (T2) some might be using to abbreviate a movie title (Terminator 2) with the terminator models.
Terminator models (there is no T2):
T-600 (Series 600): Early, large infiltrator model with rubber skin and a slow, clunky design, making it easier for humans to spot.
T-700: A precursor to the T-800, featuring a more compact design.
T-800 / T-850 / T-888: The most common and iconic model (Model 101). It uses living tissue over a titanium hyper-alloy endoskeleton for superior infiltration. The T-850 is a more durable, upgraded version with enhanced power cells.
T-1000: A highly advanced, "liquid metal" Terminator made of mimetic polyalloy, capable of shapeshifting and forming bladed weapons, though vulnerable to extreme temperatures.
T-X (Terminatrix): Known as the most sophisticated in the original timeline, it combines a solid endoskeleton with a liquid metal outer body, featuring built-in, heavy plasma weaponry.
T-3000: A John Connor hybrid created by infecting a human with nanomachines, allowing for superhuman strength and rapid regeneration.
T-5000: A highly advanced, possibly organic-based machine used by Skynet to infect others.
Rev-9: A specialized, dual-component model (similar to T-1000 and T-800 capabilities) featured in Dark Fate.
awesome (Score:3)
Time to upgrade the OS on my PowerMac1,1(Blue & White G3) with ATI Rage 128 (PCI). I actually have some fun upgrades on that machine. Like SATA, USB 2.0, and 1GHz CPU. I used to dual boot System 9 and OSX on it, but swapped in Ubuntu about 15 years ago when getting apps that supported Tiger became troublesome. Then even Linux abandoned me.
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Hah, I was just thinking the same thing about my Titanium Powerbook (G4) with the ATI Mach 64. These people are doing God's own work.
See also: Mesa Amber branch (Score:2)
Gentoo binary package host? (Score:1)
Have you looked into the Gentoo binary package host project [gentoo.org]? Lets you mix & match binary and source packages. You should be able to install a binary version of LLVM that way.
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Have you looked into the Gentoo binary package host project [gentoo.org]? Lets you mix & match binary and source packages. You should be able to install a binary version of LLVM that way.
I'm aware of it and I've set it up, but suitable packages are rarely available, especially for 32-bit x86.