What is evdev and autoloading?

[Pete Wright]

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.

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.

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.


-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA