Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2019 09:35:54 -0800 From: Steve Kargl <sgk@troutmask.apl.washington.edu> To: Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert@cschubert.com> Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org, Pete Wright <pete@nomadlogic.org>, "Rodney W. Grimes" <freebsd-rwg@pdx.rh.cn85.dnsmgr.net>, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>, Baptiste Daroussin <bapt@freebsd.org>, Niclas Zeising <zeising@freebsd.org>, "freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org" <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>, Stefan Blachmann <sblachmann@gmail.com>, Vladimir Kondratyev <vladimir@kondratyev.su> Subject: Re: What is evdev and autoloading? Message-ID: <20190219173554.GA1066@troutmask.apl.washington.edu> In-Reply-To: <362D8283-0B7D-402F-99CD-657021597955@cschubert.com> References: <201902181650.x1IGoRsZ006131@pdx.rh.CN85.dnsmgr.net> <11a49d72-3158-1b9a-f933-6702d8f5c238@nomadlogic.org> <362D8283-0B7D-402F-99CD-657021597955@cschubert.com>
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On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 08:17:48AM -0800, Cy Schubert wrote: > On February 18, 2019 9:17:37 AM PST, Pete Wright <pete@nomadlogic.org> wrote: > > > > > >On 2/18/19 8:50 AM, Rodney W. Grimes wrote: > >>> On Mon, Feb 18, 2019 at 9:12 AM Rodney W. Grimes < > >>> > >>> I don't know. I think the fact that drm2 doesn't support anything > >newer > >>> than 5-year-old hardware is a pretty convincing evidence that the > >old way > >>> is broken and doesn't work. > >> But it DOES work, I am pretty sure we have 1000's of users on that 5 > >year > >> old hardware that are totally happy with the intree DRM2 that is in > >stable/12, > >> and some of whom have ventured into head/13 are having issues with > >thete a > >> "new" model (ie kmod broken by a base commit). I know that there is > >wip > >> to get CI coverage for that, but wip is wip, and we need to start > >changing > >> the cart horse driver order we keep doing and get things right. Port > >> up and working, with CI testing *before* we go remove kmod'ed code > >from > >> base would be a much more appropriate path. > >> > >> I think one serious problem here is the summary dismissal of things > >> simply on the "5 year old" basis. Not everyone, and infact few now > >> a days other than corporate buyers, can afford new hardware, > >> giving the minimal performance increase in systems over the last 5 > >> years the cost/benifit factor of a new computer is just too low. > >I've put a lot of effort helping test and document how to get a usable > >desktop environment on a modern laptop. there were two issues which > >motivated me to do this: > > > >1) my observation that many developers at conferences and online were > >using macOS as their primary desktop environment. when comparing this > >to the OpenBSD and Linux community I felt pretty embarrassed, but it > >did > >explain the stagnant nature of our graphics subsystem. people seemed > >afraid to touch things due the brittle nature of its hardware support. > > I noticed this too. And every time it struck me as odd. > > > > >2) i was in need to an *affordable* machine with a warranty. > >fortunately > >there are many affordable laptops at staples, best-buy and amazon - but > > > >they were all post haswell systems, rendering them basically useless > >from a FreeBSD perspective. > > Which is why removing drm2 was necessary. > > > > >after trying to get traction to update the in-tree drm subsystem i was > >lucky enough to sync up with the graphics team which was working on > >syncing things up with modern hardware support. because of that i'm > >now > >able to get my small startup pretty much all on board with FreeBSD. i > >use it on my workstations as well as on or server infrastructure > >(physical and AWS). i would consider this a success for our community > >as it's opened up the eyes to a whole new generation of devs to > >FreeBSD. > > > >one thing missing from all of these arguments is real data. how many > >people are on haswell era hardware? i can tell from my experience the > >past several years the number of people who have post-haswell gear seem > > > >to be more numerous, or at least more vocal (and frankly easier to work > > > >with while squashing bugs). > > > >i can also say that personally it would be great to improve support for > > > >systems requiring drm2 - but that gear is hard to come by, so we are > >really dependent on helpful collaboration from those who are being > >effected. > > Drm2 is not required. My current laptop is 5 years old, an HD3000. The previous one is 13 years old, i915. Both work perfectly with drm-current on 13-current. Franky, I don't see what the fuss is about. > > My Dell Latitude D530 running i386 freebsd, which used the i915kms.ko now locks up solid with drm-legacy-kmod. The PAE vs non-PAE i386/conf/pmap.h merger in r342567 broke drm-legacy-kmod. It seems that Niclas has provided a patch that fixes the building of drm-legacy-kmod. Doing a bisection on /usr/src commits is fairly slow as it takes a day to build world/kernel and the minimum set of ports need to fire up Xorg. r343543 and earlier appear to work fine with drm-legacy-kmod. I have now lost 2 weeks of hacking time that could have been spent on the missing C99 complex math routines. Yeah, I know very few people care about numerical simulations on FreeBSD. -- Steve
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