X.org, distributors, and proprietary modules [LWN.net]

X.org, distributors, and proprietary modules

Posted Aug 14, 2006 21:16 UTC (Mon) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: X.org, distributors, and proprietary modules by drag
Parent article: X.org, distributors, and proprietary modules

Well, as you mention, modularization lets you upgrade the server separately from everything else (there can't be dependancies, because everything else could be talking to a server over the network, anyway). So being stuck with the server from 7.0 doesn't mean you can't use the latest versions of everything else or vice versa. I remember one of the specific reasons for modularization being that it took too long for all of the client-side stuff to be simultaneously stable, and so new server versions capable of supporting new drivers were unacceptably delayed; obviously, this works in the opposite direction as well, so a desireable effect is increased local client compatibility with obsolete servers (and therefore obsolete drivers).

(Personally, I've never used a proprietary driver, or even a separately-distributed free driver, even with the (old) nVidia card I have in one of my machines.)

to post comments

X.org, distributors, and proprietary modules

Posted Aug 14, 2006 22:28 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

Ya I don't know for sure. Maybe a X developer would be able to clarify.

To me the point has always been so that you are able to run newer drivers then your current X version has, not so much you can remain binary-compatable with old drivers.

The idea is that as driver mature you should be able to install new versions for bug fixes and such.

X.org, distributors, and proprietary modules

Posted Aug 15, 2006 9:53 UTC (Tue) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]

You can, it's just that the ABI was broken in the move to 7.1. I think the specific change was adding privates to glyphs to allow glyph caching, which was actually an Xgl change ...