Release Notes for XFree86[tm] 4.2.0
: Summary of new features in 4.2.0.
Previous: Introduction to the 4.x Release Series
Next: Drivers
2. Summary of new features in 4.2.0.
2.1. Video Driver Enhancements
- An s3 driver is added, which provides support for many of the
older non-ViRGE and non-Savage S3 chipsets.
- Some vmware driver problems are fixed, and the driver is updated
to take advantage of VMWare Workstation 3.0 features. These
include improved hardware cursor handling and support for 8 bit
emulation.
- Support added for Trident *BladeXP chipsets (currently not-accelerated).
- Xv support added for Trident TGUI series chips (not 9440 though).
- Support added for the older Trident chipsets again for ISA/VLBus (not tested)
- Support added to the glint driver for 3DLabs Permedia4, GLINT R4 and
Gamma 2 chipsets.
- Support added to the i810 driver for Intel i830 (tested on Linux only).
- Support added to the ATI radeon driver for Radeon 7500 (2D and 3D),
Radeon 8500 (2D only), and Rage128ProII.
- Support added for the Matrox G550 support. This included dual-head
support.
- Support added for NVIDIA nForce integrated graphics.
- The NVIDIA nv driver now has preliminary powerpc support for the
NV11 and NV20.
- Support added to the NVIDIA nv driver for interlaced modes on
hardware that supports this, and support for resolutions higher
than 1600x1200.
- Fixes for the savage driver on 64-bit platforms, XVideo support for the
SuperSavage, and other savage driver updates.
- The ATI r128 driver now uses the CCE DMA engine for 2D acceleration
when direct rendering is enabled, which reduces context switching
overhead and improves stability and performance for XVideo and some 2D
operations.
- The fbdev driver now supports rotation.
- Various updates to the apm, ark, chips (C&T), cirrus, i128,
neomagic, newport, s3virge, siliconmotion, sis, tdfx, tseng, vesa,
and vga drivers.
2.2. Input Driver Enhancements
- The mouse driver now has support for mouse wheel emulation.
- The mouse driver can now handle replug events on Linux for PS/2 mice.
- The "Min/Max X/Y Position" options in the elographics and mutouch
drivers are changed to "Min/Max X/Y" to be consistent with the other
input drivers.
- Linux USB keyboard access is fixed when no PS/2 controller is present.
- Added calcomp input driver.
- Added DMC input driver.
- Added hyperpen input driver.
2.3. X Server and Extension Updates
- Resynced with X.Org's X11R6.6.
- Mesa updated to the post-3.4.2 3.4 branch version as of November 2001.
- DRI drivers resynced with the latest from the DRI project.
- Various updates to the Xft library.
- The DEC-XTRAP extension is now available.
- The PEX and XIE extensions are no longer built/distributed by default.
- A security problem related to glyph clipping for large origins is fixed.
- An i810 XvMC (motion compensation) driver is now available (Linux only).
- A fatal bug XVideo Xineramification bug is fixed.
2.4. Client and Library Updates
- FreeType2 updated to version 2.0.6.
- Added libGL man pages.
- Xload now has support for displaying the load of remote hosts.
- Xterm updated to patch level 165.
- SuperProbe is removed.
- Sample xtrap clients added.
2.5. I18N and Font Updates
- New Luxi scalable fonts (TrueType and Type 1) from Bigelow &
Holmes.
These fonts are original designs by Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow.
See
below for further information.
- More locale/international keyboards supported.
- Modularized I18N support in Xlib is included from X11R6.6.
- A problem that caused bdftopcf to sometimes write corrupted fonts
is fixed.
- Some problem with Xlib's handling of CTEXT and multi-byte
characters are fixed.
- The fontenc layer is updated, and the fontenc library is now installed
and available for other applications.
- Improvements to the input method framework in Xlib for UTF-8 locales.
- A filter called ``luit'' is added, which provides locale and
ISO 2022 support to any Unicode terminal, notably xterm.
Use of luit is still experimental in this release.
2.6. OS Support Updates
- Build problems on both QNX4 and QNX6 are fixed.
- VT switching problems with the i810 driver on FreeBSD are worked around.
- Problems building modules with some enhanced versions of gcc are fixed.
- Lots of updates for Darwin/Mac OS X, including:
- On Mac OS X, a new rootless mode is added to the XDarwin
X server. This allows X clients to display windows on
the Aqua desktop.
- Xinerama support added to XDarwin
- With XDarwin in full screen mode, the depth, size, and refresh
rate can now be chosen to be different from the settings
used by Aqua.
- GLX support added for Darwin and Mac OS X with software
rendering.
- Keymap setup in XDarwin is improved, particularly for
international keyboards.
- In addition to English and Japanese, the XDarwin user
interface is now localized in Dutch, French, German, Spanish,
and Korean.
- Lots of Cygwin support updates.
- Support added for OpenBSD/powerpc.
- Build support added for Linux on IBM S/390.
- Removed stale support for Amoeba and Minix.
- Client-side support added for sparc64 on NetBSD and OpenBSD.
- Support added for building the X server on Linux/m68k.
- Support added for building on Linux/arm32.
- Updates to Linux/mips support.
A more complete list of changes can be found in the CHANGELOG that is
part of the XFree86 source tree. It can also be viewed online at our
CVSweb server.
Release Notes for XFree86[tm] 4.2.0
: Summary of new features in 4.2.0.
Previous: Introduction to the 4.x Release Series
Next: Drivers