X.Org Server 26.1 RC1: The First Major Release in Five Years

Hot on the heels of XWayland 26.1 RC1, the developers have also tagged the first release candidate of X.Org Server 26.1. This release is meant to be the first major feature release of the classic X server in five years — it succeeds the xorg-server 21.1 series.

Phoronix author Michael Larabel makes no bones about it: despite the five-year pause, X.Org Server 26.1 is far more modest in its new features than the actively developed XWayland 26.1 code. The bulk of the work on the graphics stack shifted toward Wayland long ago, and the classic server gets a tidy cleanup rather than a breakthrough.

What's changed since 21.1

The most noticeable change is dropping the Autoconf/Automake build system: only Meson remains now. Beyond that, the list of changes includes:

• support for the DPMSInfoNotify event from DPMS 1.2;
• support for XFixes 6.1 and the AllowForceTerminate option in xorg.conf;
• disallowing byte-swapped clients by default;
• disabling font-server connections by default;
• adding a DRM platform for BSD;
• relocating logs created when running without root privileges to the $XDG_STATE_HOME/xorg directory;
• support for multiple CRTCs and up to 13 mouse buttons in Xvfb;
• an expanded test suite.

Several of these items are clearly security-focused: disallowing byte-swapped clients and disabling font-server connections close off historically problematic areas around which vulnerabilities have repeatedly been found in the X.Org codebase.

Anyone wanting to dig into the details can read the official RC1 announcement. The final release of X.Org Server 26.1 is still ahead, but the very fact that it's being prepared shows that even in the Wayland era, the old server isn't being written off just yet.

Source: Phoronix