Xgl

Xgl

Compiz on Xgl with real transparency
Original author(s)	David Reveman
Initial release	January 2, 2006; 11 years ago (2006-01-02)
Type	Display server
Website

Xgl is an obsolete display server implementation supporting the X Window System protocol designed to take advantage of modern graphics cards via their OpenGL drivers, layered on top of OpenGL. It supports hardware acceleration of all X, OpenGL and XVideo applications and graphical effects by a compositing window manager such as Compiz or Beryl. The project was started by David Reveman of Novell and first released on January 2, 2006. It was removed from the X.org server in favor of AIGLX on June 12, 2008.

Xgl was originally developed on public mailing lists, but for a long time, until January 2, 2006 most development of Xgl was done behind closed doors. On that day the source to Xgl was re-opened to the public, and included in freedesktop.org, along with major restructuring to allow a wider range of supported display drivers. X server backends used by Xgl include Xglx and Xegl. In February 2006 the server gained wide publicity after a public display where the Novell desktop team demonstrated a desktop using Xgl with several visual effects such as translucent windows and a rotating 3D desktop. The effects had first been implemented in a composite manager called glxcompmgr (not to be confused with xcompmgr), now deprecated because several effects could not be adequately implemented without tighter interaction between the window manager and the composite manager. As a solution David Reveman developed Compiz, the first proper OpenGL compositing window manager for the X Window System. Later, in September 2006, the Beryl compositing window manager was released as a fork of the original Compiz. Compiz and Beryl have merged back in April 2007, which resulted in the development of Compiz Fusion.