Old xorg-server?

D

donallen

I have 10.1 installed on a Lenovo workstation, and so far it is working well. My question, though, is why the xorg-server is so old? It is 1.12.4, from over two years ago. I installed xorg with pkg, but looking at the xorg-server port tells me that I would not get a newer version by building the xorg port.

I ask because I tried installing FreeBSD 10.1 on a little Intel Atom machine that I built, and which is my primary machine, because I like the quiet, the coolness, and the low energy consumption. And it's fast enough for most of what I do, and when it isn't, I have faster, more power-hungry machines. That machine has integrated Intel graphics hardware. Linux works fine (Slackware 14.1). FreeBSD does not. I do not get the full 1920x1080 resolution. I suspect it's using the vga driver rather than the Intel driver, but I've seen this before on this machine with earlier versions of FreeBSD, and wasted a lot of time wrestling with it, trying to find an Intel driver that worked and getting the system configured to use it. I was not about to go down that rathole again, so I just restored the backup I'd done of the Slackware set prior to trying FreeBSD. (Yes, I could have gathered a lot more information, such as Xorg logs, before blowing away the install, but again, having already seen this turn into a big time-waster, I just decided to stick with Linux on this machine.)

I note that Slackware 14.1 is about a year old and Patrick is famously conservative in his approach, avoiding the latest-and-greatest in favor of proven stability. 14.1 supplies version 1.14.3 of the xorg server, about a year newer than that provided by FreeBSD 10.1.
 
X on FreeBSD is kind of a different animal than on Linux. Our single ports tree must work on all supported branches of FreeBSD, KMS support is relatively new and required kernel changes that are not a simple one-to-one import from Linux, and FreeBSD only has a few people to maintain the X ports. Despite all that, Jean-Sébastien Pédron posted yesterday that a call for testers for xorg-server 1.14 will be going out soon: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-x11/2014-November/015547.html.
 
Thanks for the information. I understand.

I will continue to test 10.1 on the Lenovo workstation, where X works well. As I said in my original post, so far it's been fine. I had v10 running on this machine for a few weeks before the release of 10.1 and just did the upgrade; 10 worked well on the machine, too. This is really my first positive experience with FreeBSD. You and I have exchanged messages in the past about issues with the new installer (which still needs work, I think; if you set up a GPT partition table and put the root file-system last, which is pretty natural -- you usually have an idea of how big you want the other file-systems -- /tmp, /home, etc. -- and want to just give the remainder to /; but if you do this, the system will not boot, so you get to redo the install; I'm pretty sure the installer could check for this pretty early in the game and prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot in this way), the USB support, the ports system and the associated packages, and, years ago, a serious bug in the ext2 support.

But so far (and it hasn't been long), things look good. The pkg command works very well, a big improvement over pkg_add and friends. Performance is good; the system feels crisp. We shall see ......
 
I just installed 10.1 on a Via C-7D with Chrome 9 graphics and Xorg seg faults. I found this (I've seen this name somewhere :rolleyes:) and am getting the exact same error:
Code: 
[ 597.951] Segmentation fault at address 0x37c
[ 597.951]
Fatal server error:
[ 597.951] Caught signal 11 (Segmentation fault). Server aborting
I installed binaries from pkg. If Xorg 1.14 is due to hit the repositories soon I can hold tight and update the packages. Any idea how long it usually takes and the best way to be aware of when the update occurs?
 
A good chance sixteen hours from when I write this, the pkg update will download a new database. [ Unsure if it will fix the Xorg problem(s) though]. It may have a large update so be sure to read /usr/ports/UPDATING and update the ports tree; maybe right before the pkg command.
 
Well, it downloaded just then. But "abort trap" on two of three pkg install ...

Code: 
Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
FreeBSD repository is up-to-date.
All repositories are up-to-date.
Checking integrity...Assertion failed: (pkgdb_ensure_loaded(j->db, p2, PKG_LOAD_FILES|PKG_LOAD_DIRS) == EPKG_OK), function pkg_conflicts_need_conflict, file pkg_jobs_conflicts.c, line 211.
Child process pid=2213 terminated abnormally: Abort trap: 6
 
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