DRM removal soon

[Justin Hibbits]

On Thu, 28 Feb 2019 13:54:39 -0800
John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> On 2/28/19 1:06 PM, Steve Kargl wrote:
> > I suppose it is the bane of those of who cannot afford
> > new hardware every 2 or 3 years.  
> 
> This is a bit of an exaggeration.  I just replaced my previous
> laptop (Thinkpad x220 from 2011 that I bought used in probably
> 2013 or so) with a Lenovo X1 from this year (which requires
> drm-kmod-current).  That's a span of 5 years.  Note that
> the in-tree drm2 drivers won't work on laptops made since
> around 2015 or so.
> 
> > I haven't looked at what the drm-fbsd11.2-kmod or 12.0 mean.  I
> > assume that these are the ports for 11-stable and 12-stable, and I
> > assume that these work on those specific stable branches.  If that
> > is the case, then there is no support needed by graphics teams
> > unless a src committer merges somethings from -current that breaks
> > stability. If the MFC is a security fix, then the graphics teams
> > may need to asked about helping troubleshoot the 11.2 and 12.0
> > kmods; otherwise, then MFC should not happen if it breaks
> > stability.  Or, perhaps, I have a s different definition of
> > 'stable.  
> 
> I think one of the issues that isn't clear is that there are other
> ports involved than just the drm-kmod ports.  The various x11 driver
> ports (xf86-video-*) use the DRM APIs.  Newer versions of those
> packages only work with newer versions of DRM, and newer versions of
> other things like KDE depend on newer versions of X libraries, etc.
> It actually ends up being a far larger ball of mud at the bottom of
> the hill than just the drm-kmod ports in terms of the dependencies
> affected by keeping older versions of DRM around.
> 
> In your case, I am hopeful that using an amd64 kernel with an i386
> chroot is going to give you an overall better experience by giving
> you more stable kernel support as well as the ability to test libm
> for both i386 and amd64 on the same machine.
> 

(Picking the latest message in the thread to respond to, nothing more):

I would like to point out that for the time being drm-legacy-kmod and
the associated xf86-video-ati-legacy driver, is required for graphics
on some powerpc systems (notably, my AmigaOne X5000).  Matt Macy did
some work to get drm-current-kmod working on the POWER9, but since his
changes touch many parts of the kernel, not just powerpc-specific
sections, it needs a pretty good review.  This will be needed for
anything to work correctly on the POWER9 TALOS systems.  I don't recall
if his work is only in his POWER9BSD repository or if he's submitted
any reviews on phabricator for it yet.  If not, I will do so when I'm
able to test on my own hardware.

tl;dr: More than i386 is impacted by drm-legacy-kmod, and I'm sure
everybody wants to get off the legacy kmod to ease the load on the
graphics team, but it will take work by the interested parties to make
this happen.

- Justin