NEW_XORG and vt(4) in stable branches

[Kevin Oberman]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 1:22 AM, Niclas Zeising <zeising at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On 2014-02-12 20:43, John Baldwin wrote:
> > I just wanted to drop a note to see if everyone is on the same page
> here.  I
> > know that core@ has been discussing the NEW_XORG internally quite a
> bit, but
> > that has all been internal to core@ so far.
>
> Good to know that it is being worked on.
> >
> > Our current feeling is that we would like to not enable NEW_XORG by
> default
> > for the packages for a given src branch until vt(4) has been merged to
> that
> > branch.  We do not think that vt(4) needs to be enabled by default in the
> > branch; just having it available as an option as it is in HEAD would be
> > sufficient.  Our understanding is that merging vt(4) in its current-ish
> form
> > to stable/10 and stable/9 is quite feasible and not a major nightmare.
>  We do
> > not feel that it is necessary to merge to stable/8 as drm2 isn't merged
> to
> > stable/8 either.  (Our assumption is that stable/8 will just stay with
> the old
> > Xorg and the ports tree will have to support old Xorg until 8.x support
> in
> > ports is EOL'd.)
>
> I understand your (core's) position on not wanting to enable NEW_XORG
> untill vt(4) is merged.  I currently don't know status of such a merge,
> hopefully ray@ can fill in with that.
> stable/8 is getting harder and harder to maintain, at some point we will
> have to start breaking stuff, as will the kde team it sounds like.  Of
> course we do our best not to do this.
> [...]
> I hope this clears things up, otherwise please let me/us know!
> Regards!
> --
> Niclas
>

I'm just slightly confused by this. I am unaware of any reason that the use
of NEW_XORG requires vt(4). KMS certainly does, but NEW_XORG should not, as
far as I can tell. At least it does not on my system. I do believe that
NEW_XORG will break some really old graphics cards, but I don't see how
vt(4) will help this.

Am I missing something?

And I am very anxious to see vt(4) merged into 9 and 10, but I don't see
how it impacts moving to NEW_XORG as default.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com