NEW_XORG and vt(4) in stable branches

[David Chisnall]

On 14 Feb 2014, at 02:12, Kevin Oberman <rkoberman at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

KMS is required for several of the new drivers.  Without KMS, NEW_XORG means Intel GPUs can only use VESA (the same is true for radeon, but the old radeon driver doesn't work at all with newer cards so it's not as much of a regression).  With KMS and without vt(4), starting X means losing consoles.  The only way to introduce NEW_XORG without introducing feature regressions is to have vt(4).  This is why we asked the Foundation to fund the vt(4) work.

David