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Date:      10 Sep 2003 17:59:08 +0100
From:      Doug Rabson <dfr@nlsystems.com>
To:        John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>
Cc:        arch@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   RE: When to burn those bridges
Message-ID:  <1063213147.26798.1.camel@builder02.qubesoft.com>
In-Reply-To: <XFMail.20030910123049.jhb@FreeBSD.org>
References:  <XFMail.20030910123049.jhb@FreeBSD.org>

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On Wed, 2003-09-10 at 17:30, John Baldwin wrote:
> On 10-Sep-2003 Doug Rabson wrote:
> > On Wed, 2003-09-10 at 08:53, Eric Anholt wrote:
> >> On Wed, 2003-09-10 at 00:15, John Baldwin wrote:
> >> > On 09-Sep-2003 Doug Rabson wrote:
> >> > > I haven't been paying much attention recently on release engineering
> >> > > issues so probably I have missed something. When do people think is the
> >> > > right time to branch off the 5.x line of development and set fire to the
> >> > > bridges?
> >> > 
> >> > Go ahead and kill the ISA compat drivers if you need to.  I do think
> >> > that you can probably do this work in a p4 branch until it is ready
> >> > and delay the killing of compat shims until then maybe.
> >> > 
> >> > > This led me back to the idea of multiple inheritance in kobj/newbus.
> >> > > Using multiple inheritance for the smbus re-work makes the chip drivers
> >> > > much simpler since they don't have to explicitly list the 'parent'
> >> > > methods in their method tables. The same thing goes for cardbus too. On
> >> > > these lines, I went back and read through Justin's old inheritance
> >> > > patches. These patches supported single inheritance for multiple
> >> > > interfaces at the cost of changing the driver API considerably. I've
> >> > > been tinkering with an alternative approach which supports multiple
> >> > > inheritance at the class level, almost preserving the driver API while
> >> > > changing the ABI slightly.
> >> > 
> >> > Yes, please.  There is the same problem with agp(4) and the hostb(4)
> >> > driver and agp(4) for Intel motherboards with onboard graphics and
> >> > the drm(4) driver for the same graphics chip.
> >> 
> >> I thought we wanted agp(4) to replace hostb(4) when agp would attach. 
> >> It's not the same problem for intel onboard graphics and the drm driver,
> >> then, since we need both drivers for the DRM to work.  I think keithw
> >> solved this by making the agp driver provide a "drmsub" child device
> >> which the i8x0 DRM attaches to.  Would there be any problems with
> >> putting that in CVS?
> > 
> > That is exactly what Keith did for the i830. I have his patches for it
> > and I was supposed to review and commit them but they kind of got pushed
> > to the bottom of the pile due to my recent house move. Would you like to
> > do the honours? As far as I'm concerned, the patches are commit-ready
> > apart from some minor violations of style(9) which I don't really care
> > about but others might.
> 
> We still get texture corruption on the i830 that we are tracking down.
> We also have several other problems with missed interrupts due to
> lack of spl() usage in DRM.  I also have the patches and can try
> to clean them up and commit them once Keith signs off on them.
> Back to the hostb problem: notice that agp can't be kldloaded because
> it can't attach to hostb because hostb is attached to it.  If agp
> were a separate device instance from teh hostb device, then you could
> kldload agp.

My feeling about that was always that the hostb driver provides
absolutely no added value in the system. When I was developing agp
originally, I just nuked it and kldloading agp.ko worked just fine.





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