Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2020 18:07:28 -0600 From: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> To: Chris <bsd-lists@bsdforge.com> Cc: FreeBSD X11 <x11@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: deprecation of drm-legacy-kmod Message-ID: <CANCZdfqZADozi-uBOEz8zJuUmRdNi9%2B8ryzzsJObhuEE3RqjFg@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <caefaea84e701f966bc3b5dd9a0d7bef@bsdforge.com> References: <e770c456-c6fa-924c-0f1e-1d69ce80846f@freebsd.org> <caefaea84e701f966bc3b5dd9a0d7bef@bsdforge.com>
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On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 11:28 AM Chris <bsd-lists@bsdforge.com> wrote: > On 2020-08-24 15:21, Niclas Zeising wrote: > > [ 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. > If this were pulled today. What are the ramifications? IOW what (A)GPUs > would > no longer be available for use on FreeBSD? Does one need to join a Linux > Graphics > list to find out what's currently supported? If so. What version of the > Linux > kernel? > The ramifications are three fold. (1) There's some truly ancient graphics hardware that won't be supported anymore. However they still work on stable 11 and stable 12. (2) Improvements to the scaling of VM system can proceed forward. (3) Efforts can be focused on the 5.4 Linux port that's in progress and testing in -current. For most people, though, this doesn't matter. It's not used by default and you have to specifically opt into using it. Warner
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