NEW_XORG and vt(4) in stable branches

[Kevin Oberman]

On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 12:24 AM, David Chisnall <theraven at freebsd.org>wrote:

> 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.
>

Yes, I agre. I have an Intel GPU and it either must run KMS or VESA (which
really sucks). But, AFAIK, NEW_XORG does not break VESA, so making NEW_XORG
default regresses nothing. I am running with KMS and have no access to vtys
once I start X. I can see no regression from "It's broken" to "It's
broken". And VESA is pretty broken on it, though I lived with it for about
9 months until the first release of KMS for testing on 9.

Is it the case that NEW_XORG breaks syscons on some pre-Sandybridge systems
that would work with UMS but won't work with NEW_XORG? If that is the case,
I do understand. I was not aware of this issue.

Thanks!
-
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com