Day 3: Conferences: Introduction to XFree86-4.0

Dirk Hohndel is employed by Suse Germany and he works full time on XFree86.

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This talk was really something I was looking forward to (and so where many other people, the room was packed). XFree is a major piece of Linux that most people use everyday, and if some new card is not yet supported, or if X crashes, linux itself looks bad.
I think we need to give credit to the entire XFree team for the work they've done so far.

So, one of the problems with XFree, is that a lot of code is really old, and several layers were pilled on to of it, turning the whole thing into a big mess that is difficult to understand and to work with (I'm talking about developpers, not users).
This is the reasons why the XFree developpers decided to clean this up with the new XFree release: XFree 4.0. The only little problem is that they took that decision back in the XFree 3.2 days, and that 2 years later, they're still working on it (but it should be finished really soon now [tm] ). So, in the meantime, they continued to maintain the 3.3 branch in parallel and 4.0 got really delayed (LinuxWorld Expo had a tutorial on how to configure XFree 4.0, thinking back then that 4.0 would be out by the time the expo came)

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Dirk gave out a lot of information during his talk. Here are a few highlights:

XFree 4.0 uses modules, so you end up with one server, and vendors can release binary only modules if they wish (and they will be OS independant)
Multihead support (extremely flexible, windows can share screens)
Overlay support (16+8 or 24+8 visuals)
Redesign of XAA (X Accelerated Architecture)
Faster drivers for several cards
Support for new chipsets, but some old, difficult to find chipsets, will be dropped (they just can't find any of those old cards anymore)
Support for truetype fonts
Hooks for accelerated OpenGL/Mesa support
Open source GLX implementation from SGI

Elizabeth Coolbaugh also has a nice transcript

Picture library

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