On 05/18/18 19:58, Niclas Zeising wrote:
[ Cross posted to freebsd-current@ and freebsd-x11@. Please respect
reply-to and send all replies to freebsd-x11@. Thanks! ]
Hi!
I propose that we remove the old drm2 driver (sys/dev/drm2) from
FreeBSD. I suggest the driver is marked as deprecated in 11.x and
removed from 12.0, as was done for other drivers recently. Some
background and rationale:
The drm2 driver was the original port of a KMS driver to FreeBSD. It
was done by Konstantin Belousov to support Intel graphics cards, and
later extended by Jean-Sébastien Pédron as well as Konstantin to match
what's in Linux 3.8. This included unstable support from Haswell, but
nothing newer than that.
For quite some time now we have had the graphics/drm-stable-kmod and
graphics/drm-next-kmods which provides support for modern AMD and Intel
graphics cards. These ports, together with the linuxkpi, or lkpi, has
made it significantly easier to port and update our graphics drivers.
Further, these new drivers cover the same drivers as the old drm2 driver.
What does the community think? Is there anyone still using the drm2
driver on 12-CURRENT? If so, what is preventing you from switching to
the port?
Wow, this blew up quite a lot bigger than I anticipated. I'll try to
summarize the discussion a bit below and then suggest a way forward.
The primary reasons we want to do this is because there are conflicts
between the new drm drivers in ports, and the drm drivers in base, since
they control the same hardware. It is hard to make conflicting drivers
to auto load in a consistent way. In order to improve the desktop
experience I'd like to see that graphics drivers are loaded on system
boot. There is also a push from upstream to have the xf86-video*
drivers stop loading driver kernel modules. It is also easier to keep a
port updated than keeping the base system updated, and updates can
propagate to multiple FreeBSD versions at once. This will also ensure
that all ports use the same firmware blobs.
So, to the summary. A lot of people are using i386, and as such still
need the old drm drivers. There were also some reports about issues
with the drm-next/stable drivers, which needs investigating. Power is
another architecture that also is not supported by drm-next/stable,
although we hope to extend support to powerpc in the future. There was a
lot of discussion regarding making it into a port, or only excluding the
driver on amd64, and similar suggestions.
To move forward, we'll do the following: Note that this is for current
only.
We take the drm and drm2 drivers and make a port for it, maintained by
the graphics team (x11@). After a transition period, then the drivers
are removed from base. At the same time, pkg-messages are added to
relevant places to point people to the various available drm drivers.
Regards
--
Niclas Zeising
FreeBSD graphics/x11 team
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