X.org lone ranger rides to rescue multi-monitor refresh rates

It isn't quite XKCD 2347, but it's close. At least one developer is still working away on the X.org codebase with an effort to improve variable refresh rate support in several different OSes.

The code commit improves the multi-monitor handling to the existing support for variable refresh rate displays that X.org gained as recently as 2021. The current code works, but it can only change the refresh rate of the first screen. With the new code, it should be able to handle several displays combined with Xinerama.

The lone code-ranger is Enrico Weigelt, who describes himself as an "old Linux hacker and kernel maintainer." This is not the only project Weigelt is working on in the X.org codebase. Last month, he announced the X.org testing ground, which he describes as "a little toolkit to help in testing X.org Xserver."

"The idea is giving testers a tool for installing latest X.org directly from git heads, so they don't need to do this manually any more."

This month, he released version 0.0.4 of the X.org testing ground, which adds support for the Illumos family of OSes, forked from OpenSolaris after Oracle axed the project back in 2010. Several projects are continuing work on Illumos, and we looked at OpenIndiana at the end of 2022. It's one of the most desktop-oriented members of the family. Others, such as Joyent Triton, formerly known as SmartOS, are much more server-focused.

This brings the range of supported OSes up to five: Debian-based Linux distros, FreeBSD 14, NetBSD 10, OpenBSD 7.5, and now OpenIndiana Hipster. This reflects one of the core features of X11, which is not a priority for Wayland. X11 runs on more or less every Unix-like OS ever made, proprietary or FOSS, and because working over a network is part of its design, it enables almost any of them to display a graphical app on any other. Wayland was designed for Linux, and although it's gradually gaining BSD support, it will never run on Solaris, AIX, or the like.

X.org has worked with multi-head systems for decades, but in the early days, each display was entirely separate - there was no easy way to combine them into one big virtual desktop. That is what Xinerama delivered, and it has been open source since 1998 when it became part of Xfree86 4.0. Today, the Arch wiki refers to it as "the old Xinerama setup," and suggests RandR instead, complete with an explanation of why it's better. However, as a 20th century tool, Xinerama works with proprietary drivers, and on other, older OSes as well.

We suspect that this cross-platform nature of X.org may keep it alive for many years to come. Not everyone runs Linux, and not everyone wants one of the few modern desktop environments that runs under Wayland - at present, that mainly means KDE and GNOME, plus a few tiling window managers, and some custom environments such as the one in Raspberry Pi OS 5. If you're running one of the BSDs and talking to a few proprietary Unix variants, Wayland is no help to you, and as long as people want such things, X11 won't die. ®