your mail

[Emil Velikov]

Hi Niclas,

On 15 May 2018 at 09:07, Niclas Zeising <zeising at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On 05/15/18 00:47, Emil Velikov wrote:
>>
>> On 22 February 2017 at 14:46, Matthew Rezny <rezny at freebsd.org> wrote:
>>
>>> It has been my intent to upstream as much as possible, but I was trying
>>> to get
>>> us caught up to current before doing so.
>>
>>
>> Any idea what happened to this?
>>
>> Earlier I joined the #freebsd-xorg channel, yet it seems fairly inactive.
>> Repeating some of my questions here, hope anyone can shed some light:
>>
>>   - How does FreeBSD handle loading of kernel DRM/GPU modules?
>> Is there a daemon of sorts, manually or via hacking the graphics stack
>> - Xorg/xf86-video*/etc
>>
>>   - ^^ creating /dev nodes
>>
>>   - How capable is your sysfs compat? Or more importantly how frowned
>> upon it is to use it on FreeBSD?
>>
>> And an extra one:
>> - How does one contribute patches to (say the graphics - libdrm/mesa/etc)
>> ports?
>> Is there some instructions and CI there I can throw some patches at?
>>
>
> Hi!
> Thank you for your mail and thanks for reaching out!  I was one of the ones
> responding on IRC, unfortunately you caught me at a bad time here, hence my
> suggestion to send an e-mail.
>
> I know the FreeBSD graphcis effort have been somewhat dormant (yeah, that's
> an understatement), but I'm working on getting it going again with a group
> of people.  It's still in the early stages but hopefully something will come
> out of it.  We had such a team about 4 or 5 years back, but people,
> including myself, got different priorities (you know, life happens).
>
Glad to hear there's plans on reviving it.

> Currently, we have a working area and development repos on gitub, which you
> can find here https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/, amongst other things
> there's a fork of the FreeBSD ports repo there where most ports development
> happens.  There's no problem getting you access to that one, and we can also
> add forks of upstream mesa and drm repos and so on.
Since I'm not using/testing FreeBSD I'm looking for someone to review
any patches ;-)
Having commit access is not really required on my end.


>  We also have a gitter
> chat that we're trying out.  It can be found here:
> https://gitter.im/FreeBSDDesktop/Lobby, you're welcome to join there as
> well.  It's connected to github.  The IRC channel #freebsd-xorg is
> unfortunately somewhat dormant, because not everyone hangs out there, but
> I'm available there as well.
>
Ack. Will do in a moment.


> As I said, we're still early in the process, so all details aren't 100% set
> yet, but this is what we have going for now.
>
> Now, to your questions.  As far as I know, there's no automatic loading of
> the graphics modules, apart from the really old stuff.  If memory serves me
> correctly.  The current way of doing it is to load the module before
> starting X, usually as part of the boot process.  There might be a hack in
> xf86-video-intel to load some modules, but not the latest kms graphics
> modules.
>
To load the module, currently there are hacks in
xf86-video-{intel,ati,amdgpu} and perhaps others.
See my patch removing one [1], there extra reasoning in the thread and
complete silence from the FreeBSD author ;-(

[1] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/amd-gfx/2018-April/020935.html

> Creating /dev nodes is handled automatically by devfs and devd.  I don't
> know how it's done in detail, but it's automatic as far as at least I'm
> concerned.
>
Ack. On Linux the same daemon (udevd in our case) loads the kernel
module also creates the node.
Has there been attempts/discussions about doing the same in FreeBSD?


> As for sysfs, mmacy gave a good responce on IRC.
>
Are you sure it wasn't on gitter? You're the only person who wrote in
the IRC channel since I joined.
Can you please copy it here or share a link?


> For patches and contributing, as I said, we're trying to set up shop on
> github (and from there merge into FreeBSD SVN repos).  The kernel bits
> (what's called drm-next sometimes) are already there, and I've started
> working on a ports repo there as well.  That's probably the best place to
> start.  We don't have a CI setup currently, I use the package building
> system poudriere locally on my desktop.  I can help you get started with
> both poudriere and the FreeBSD ports system, and I can also help with adding
> patches to the ports and build packages for testing.
> I hope to be able to add more automatic building and some sort of CI
> solution in the future, but this is where we're at today.
>
Future looks good, fingers crossed it shouldn't take too long to reach.

> We already have some local patches, they should be upstreamed, but I haven't
> had time to work through them, and since I don't know exactly how they work,
> it will take some time to get them upstream.
> Can I contact you directly to get them upstreamed once they're ready?
>
In general I'd recommend two things:
 - send patches upstream _alongside_ the FreeBSD submission
Either the submitter or reviewer can do that. You want that to avoid
redoing the same work multiple times.
 - contact the project itself, not individuals
You can CC individuals, but having only one person is back since the
review comments may be partial or outright wrong.

> Once again, thank you very much for reaching out, and thank you for reading
> to the end!

Thanks for taking the time to right this. I'll see about opening a PR
or two on FreeBSDDesktop.
Fingers crossed it will flow smoothly and get into the official repos quickly.

-Emil