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Date:      Tue, 25 Aug 2020 00:21:03 +0200
From:      Niclas Zeising <zeising@freebsd.org>
To:        current@FreeBSD.org, stable@FreeBSD.org, ports@FreeBSD.org, x11@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   deprecation of drm-legacy-kmod
Message-ID:  <e770c456-c6fa-924c-0f1e-1d69ce80846f@freebsd.org>

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[ cross posted across several mailing lists, please respect reply-to ]

Hi!

It is time to deprecate drm-legacy-kmod, since it is taking too much 
time to maintain and are holding off changes in other areas.

drm-legacy-kmod was created to aid in the transition to the LinuxKPI 
based graphics drivers, at a time when the new drivers only supported 
amd64.  Since then, the new drivers have been updated to support more 
architectures and more GPUs, and the burden of maintaining 
drm-legacy-kmod has increased.  It became apparent with the update of 
xorg-server to 1.20 that drm-legacy-kmod is too old to work with certain 
aspects of the graphics stack, and it is also holding back changes in 
areas of the FreeBSD base system such as VM scaling and optimization. 
The VM locking protocol needs to be changed, and to port those changes 
to these drivers would require extensive reworking of its use of the 
FreeBSD VM subsystem.  This means it is time for it to go.

The driver will remain for a transition period.  For FreeBSD 13-CURRENT, 
this will be fairly short, as there are changes to FreeBSD base that 
breaks the drivers.  For FreeBSD 12, the driver will remain a bit 
longer, to ease in transition.  On FreeBSD 12, there is also the option 
of using the graphics drivers in base, although those are supported on a 
best-effort basis only.

Regards
-- 
Niclas Zeising
FreeBSD Graphics Team



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