Should 9.3 carry a warning about NEW_XORG

[Adrian Chadd]

I think people are a bit .. mis-understanding the issue.

The upstream developers are the ones who don't care for older
hardware. They actively don't care about older hardware. Like, very
actively.

Running an older Xorg with newer software plainly won't work because
increasingly larger amounts of software is using some form of direct
rendering library with no fallback.

So it's not just updating to newer Xorg - it's actually letting the
ports people update to the later versions of the DRI infrastructure so
they can update to the current versions of web browsers and desktop
environments.

If you have a problem with this then please take it up with the
Linux-centric, current-hardware-only UNIX graphic environment
development model.



-a


On 6 July 2014 06:47, Ian Smith <smithi at nimnet.asn.au> wrote:
> On Sat, 5 Jul 2014 04:58:32 -0600, Warren Block wrote:
>  > On Sat, 5 Jul 2014, John Marshall wrote:
>  >
>  > > Perhaps my "X no longer works" scenario is due to "certain hardware"?
>  > > Is there a list somewhere of hardware on which NEW_XORG will not work,
>  > > so that folks running 9.2 with that hardware can set WITHOUT_NEW_XORG
>  > > BEFORE they upgrade to 9.3 and save themselves grief?
>  >
>  > There is a list of video cards, both working and non-working:
>  > https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics#Video_cards
>
> Which is unsurprisingly focussed on the newer hardware - what developers
> have and use, virtually by definition - but there's scant reference to
> what older hardware may NO LONGER be supported in newX.
>
> John has a T43 thinkpad, with unstated graphics hardware; intel 915 or
> Radeon X300 according to thinkwiki?  And I have two going T23s with S3
> SuperSavage IX/C (2002 vintage) and an X200 with intel GM45 Contiga,
> just 'pre-2009' referring to:
>
> https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/WITH_NEW_XORG
>
> which leaves me unsure of support for these with new xorg, particularly
> when the footnote for VT switching(1) is incorrect for the meaning of
> 'works' - the X200's GM45 happily switches to sc(4) vts from X - though
> it seems an unexpected X upgrade to WITH_NEW_XORG would likely leave me
> without visible vts until building a VT kernel? (and even then?)
>
> I've read this thread 3 times and followed relevant references and I'm
> still confused about the 9.3-RELEASE scenario.
>
> It seems that if you upgrade from 9.1 or 9.2 you will need to manually
> intervene, either way .. please correct any incorrect assumptions:
>
> . if you don't wish your ports updated to new Xorg you'll need to add
> WITHOUT_NEW_XORG to make.conf before updating any relevant ports, though
> - inconsistently? - any installed packages, including those on the DVD,
> will still be for old Xorg.  Until you are sure this is the safer way -
> but you have to know about it when upgrading.
>
> . if you do want ports updated to new Xorg and you have older graphics
> hardware you'll need to compile a VT kernel to get vt switching from X
> back .. and you'll need to add the new repo to get new Xorg packages.
>
> Seeing that a perhaps not miniscule proportion of 9.x X users will need
> to do some manual configuration on upgrading to 9.3, a relevant WARNING
> in http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.3R/relnotes.html should be helpful.
>
> cheers, Ian
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-stable at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"