3. Summary of new features in 4.0.3.

3.1. X server

• Darwin/Mac OS X is now supported on PowerPC and Intel/x86. The X server runs from the console or in cooperation with the Mac OS X Aqua GUI. The X server for this platform is called "XDarwin", and its installation and configuration is different from the "XFree86" server used on other platforms. Please read the XFree86 on Darwin and Mac OS X document for further information.
• Mesa has been updated to the 3.4 stable release.
• A driver for ATI Radeon adapters has been added.
• ATI driver support for multi-head configurations and non-Intel platforms has been improved.
• The ATI driver has been changed to invoke the appropriate driver for any Rage 128 and Radeon adapters that it finds in the system.
• A driver (i128) for Number Nine chipsets has been added.
• A driver (savage) for S3 Savage chipsets has been added.
• A driver (siliconmotion) for some Silicon Motion chipsets has been added.
• The driver (ark) for Ark Logic chips has been ported to 4.x.
• A VESA driver has been added.
• A driver for SGI newport cards has been added (Linux/mips).
• The trident driver has lots of fixes to the CyberBlade/Blade support, XVideo support for the Image/Blade series (although scaling doesn't work yet on the Image series).
• The s3virge driver has stabilized ViRGE GX2 support, includes ViRGE DX and ViRGE support for XVideo YUV images, and various fixes.
• The 3Dlabs (glint) driver now has Permedia3 support.
• The SiS driver has had many updates, and XVideo support for the 630 is included.
• The NVIDIA (nv) driver has been updated to include support for the GeForce2, and line acceleration has been added. Also, DDC support has been improved, and support added for Alpha platforms (dense only).
• The neomagic driver has had various bug fixes and extended acceleration support. DGA support has also been added.
• The Chips and Technologies driver (chips) has initial support for the 69030.
• The tseng driver has multi-head fixes and DGA support has been added.
• Most video drivers have been converted to use the integrated "fb" framebuffer code instead of the old "cfb" code.
• DRI support has been updated for the Rage 128, 3Dfx Voodoo3 and Voodoo5, Intel i810/i815 and Matrox G400. DRI support for SiS and Sun Creator3D is available. The DRI is now also available on Alpha platforms.
• An input driver (citron) for Citron Infrared Touch devices has been added.
• An input driver (penmount) for PenMount devices has been added.
• An input driver (digitaledge) for DigitalEdge devices has been added.
• Big endian problems in Xinerama have been fixed.
• The new "render" extension has been added (see below). The design has been extended in the following ways:
  • A new FillRectangles request was added.
  • The 'mask' operand was changed to allow per-channel alphas.

  Server implementation:

  • Implemented remaining code for client clip lists.
  • Fixed plenty of bugs related to text rendering.
  • Complete compositing code, except for separate alpha.

  Todo:

  • Polygons
  • Image scaling
  • Separate alpha channels
  • Support for visuals other than TrueColor.

  Drivers with render extension support include: i128, glint, ati (r128 and radeon), chips, cirrus, mga, neomagic, nv, tdfx, trident, tseng, vesa, s3virge.

  Acceleration for the render extension:

  • XAA infrastructure for acceleration.
  • Experimental MGA acceleration using XAA
  • kdrive (TinyX) infrastructure
  • Experimental TinyX Trident 9525DVD acceleration

  Xft library:

  • New font naming/access library.
  • Abstraction for core/Render text.
  • Uses FreeType2 rasterizer.
  • Allows anti-aliased/subpixel sampled text.
  • Gracefully falls back to core rendering.
  • Complicated font matching mechanism.
  • Uses server DPI to convert point sizes to pixel sizes, even for core fonts.

  xterm:

  • Can use Xft, by default uses core fonts.
  • Uses new options '-fa' for family name and '-fs' for font size (in points).

  x11perf:

  • Add tests for anti-aliased, subpixel sampled and aliased fonts using the Xft library.

  xditview:

  • When the Xft library is build, uses Xft for all font access.

  Qt, Gtk, twm:

  • Qt changes available here.
  • Gtk changes in process.
  • twm hacks should never see the light of day.

• xf86cfg, a new graphical configuration tool for XFree86 4.x, and can be used to either write the initial configuration or make customisations to the current configuration. xf86cfg is a work in progress, and allows configuration of:
  • Specific setup of monitors, cards, keyboards and mice, as well as adding or removing them.
  • Server layout setup, allowing complex configuration of physical monitor positions, default color depth and/or rotated monitors.
  • Mode line editor that can be used to configure multiple monitors, and allows adding a modeline specific to a monitor directly to the configuration file.
  • AccessX configuration interface, that provides an interface to easy setup of most AccessX options, including:
    • Timeout to reset controls.
    • StickyKeys, for people with disabilities that cannot press two keys at the same time.
    • MouseKeys, mouse control only with the keyboard.
    • RepeatKeys, repeat rate and repeat delay.
    • SlowKeys, to avoid pressing keys accidentally, they're only accepted if pressed for some specific amount of time.
    • BounceKeys, helps avoiding multiple key presses by only accepting a key if it is pressed only once and not pressed again in a specific amount of time.

  New configuration options are being worked on, as well as correcting some of the bugs in the current options. A protocol for plugging in external modules is also planned.

3.2. X libraries and clients.

• Significant updates to the internationalisation support in Xlib (see below).
• Some xfs updates, including font path verification, and new options.
• XTerm updates.
• New "xvinfo" client for querying the XVideo extension.

3.3. Fonts and Internationalisation

• Many of the "misc" bdf fonts have been updated and extended, and a wider range of ISO-8859 subsets have been added. These are now auto-generated from ISO-10646 encoded master fonts.
• The ClearlyU ISO-10646 encoded fonts have been updated.
• Functions to read keyboard input in locale independent UTF-8 encoding have been added to libX11: Xutf8LookupString, Xutf8ResetIC.
• Functions to output strings in locale independent UTF-8 encoding have been added to libX11: Xutf8DrawString, Xutf8DrawImageString, Xutf8TextEscapement, Xutf8TextExtents, Xutf8TextPerCharExtents, Xutf8DrawText.
• Functions to convert between Compound Text or locale dependent encoding and UTF-8 have been added to libX11: Xutf8TextListToTextProperty, Xutf8TextPropertyToTextList. The converter between Compound Text and UTF-8 in Xlib has been improved; a round-trip conversion now correctly converts all graphic Unicode characters back and forth.
• libXaw now offers selected text using both selection targets, UTF8_STRING and COMPOUND_TEXT.
• Locales with UTF-8 encodings are now supported; but the UTF-8 displaying facilities are not adequate yet.
• XKB keyboard definitions have been added and updated for some countries.

3.4. Platforms

• Darwin/Mac OS X.
• Greatly improved IA-64 support.
• Improved Linux/mips support.
• Support has been added for more Alpha platforms under Linux. This now includes all platforms that require sparse memory mapping.