Mesa (computer graphics)Mesa, also called Mesa3D and The Mesa 3D Graphics Library, is an open source implementation of OpenGL, Vulkan, and other graphics API specifications. Mesa translates these specifications to vendor-specific graphics hardware drivers. Its most important users are two graphics drivers mostly developed and funded by Intel and AMD for their respective hardware (AMD promotes their Mesa drivers Radeon and RadeonSI over the deprecated AMD Catalyst, and Intel has only supported the Mesa driver). Proprietary graphics drivers (e.
Wayland (protocol)Wayland is a communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. A display server using the Wayland protocol is called a Wayland compositor, because it additionally performs the task of a compositing window manager. Wayland is developed by a group of volunteers initially led by Kristian Høgsberg as a free and open-source community-driven project with the aim of replacing the X Window System with a modern, secure, and simpler windowing system for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
Multiple bufferingIn computer science, multiple buffering is the use of more than one buffer to hold a block of data, so that a "reader" will see a complete (though perhaps old) version of the data, rather than a partially updated version of the data being created by a "writer". It is very commonly used for computer display images. It is also used to avoid the need to use dual-ported RAM (DPRAM) when the readers and writers are different devices. An easy way to explain how multiple buffering works is to take a real-world example.
Linux kernelThe Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally written in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU operating system, which was written to be a free (libre) replacement for Unix. Linux is provided under the GNU General Public License version 2 only, but it contains files under other compatible licenses.
XFree86XFree86 is an implementation of the X Window System. It was originally written for Unix-like operating systems on IBM PC compatibles and was available for many other operating systems and platforms. It is free and open source software under the XFree86 License version 1.1. It was developed by the XFree86 Project, Inc. The lead developer was David Dawes. The last released version was 4.8.0, released December 2008. The last XFree86 CVS commit was made on May 18, 2009; the project was confirmed dormant in December 2011.
Compositing window managerA compositing manager, or compositor, is software that provides applications with an off-screen buffer for each window. The compositing manager composites the window buffers into an image representing the screen and writes the result into the display memory. A compositing window manager is a window manager that is also a compositing manager. Compositing managers may perform additional processing on buffered windows, applying 2D and 3D animated effects such as blending, fading, , rotation, duplication, bending and contortion, shuffling, blurring, redirecting applications, and translating windows into one of a number of displays and virtual desktops.
GTKGTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the Wayland and X11 windowing systems. The GTK team releases new versions on a regular basis. GTK 4 and GTK 3 are maintained, while GTK 2 is end-of-life. GTK1 is independently maintained by the CinePaint project.
Nouveau (software)nouveau (nu:ˈvoʊ) is a free and open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards and the Tegra family of SoCs written by independent software engineers, with minor help from Nvidia employees. The project's goal is to create an open source driver by reverse engineering Nvidia's proprietary Linux drivers. It is managed by the X.Org Foundation, hosted by freedesktop.org, and is distributed as part of Mesa 3D. The project was initially based on the 2D-only free and open-source "nv" driver, which Red Hat developer Matthew Garrett and others claim had been obfuscated.
FreeBSDFreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular open-source BSD operating system, accounting for more than three-quarters of all installed and permissively licensed BSD systems. FreeBSD has similarities with Linux, with two major differences in scope and licensing: FreeBSD maintains a complete system, i.e.
Freedesktop.orgfreedesktop.org (fd.o), formerly X Desktop Group (XDG), is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free-software desktop environments for the X Window System (X11) and Wayland on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It was founded by Havoc Pennington, a GNOME developer working for Red Hat in March 2000. Some of the project's servers are hosted by Portland State University, sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Google.
X.Org ServerX.Org Server is the free and open-source implementation of the X Window System display server stewarded by the X.Org Foundation. Implementations of the client-side X Window System protocol exist in the form of X11 libraries, which serve as helpful APIs for communicating with the X server. Two such major X libraries exist for X11. The first of these libraries was Xlib, the original C language X11 API, but another C language X library, XCB, was created later in 2001.
Qt (software)Qt (pronounced "cute" or as an initialism) is free and open-source cross-platform software for creating graphical user interfaces as well as cross-platform applications that run on various software and hardware platforms such as Linux, Windows, macOS, Android or embedded systems with little or no change in the underlying codebase while still being a native application with native capabilities and speed. Qt is currently being developed by The Qt Company, a publicly listed company, and the Qt Project under open-source governance, involving individual developers and organizations working to advance Qt.
RadeonRadeon (ˈreɪdiɒn) is a brand of computer products, including graphics processing units, random-access memory, RAM disk software, and solid-state drives, produced by Radeon Technologies Group, a division of AMD. The brand was launched in 2000 by ATI Technologies, which was acquired by AMD in 2006 for US$5.4 billion. Radeon Graphics is the successor to the Rage line. Three different families of microarchitectures can be roughly distinguished, the fixed-pipeline family, the unified shader model-families of TeraScale and Graphics Core Next.
Free and open-source graphics device driverA free and open-source graphics device driver is a software stack which controls computer-graphics hardware and supports graphics-rendering application programming interfaces (APIs) and is released under a free and open-source software license. Graphics device drivers are written for specific hardware to work within a specific operating system kernel and to support a range of APIs used by applications to access the graphics hardware. They may also control output to the display if the display driver is part of the graphics hardware.
Binary blobIn the context of free and open-source software, proprietary software only available as a binary executable is referred to as a blob or binary blob. The term usually refers to a device driver module loaded into the kernel of an open-source operating system, and is sometimes also applied to code running outside the kernel, such as system firmware images, microcode updates, or userland programs. The term blob was first used in database management systems to describe a collection of binary data stored as a single entity.
