[RFC] Deprecation and removal of the drm2 driver

[Don Lewis]

On 18 May, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Fri, May 18, 2018 at 1:30 PM, Steve Kargl <
> sgk at troutmask.apl.washington.edu> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, May 18, 2018 at 09:14:24PM +0200, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
>> > On Fri, May 18, 2018, 20:00 Niclas Zeising <zeising at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > > I propose that we remove the old drm2 driver (sys/dev/drm2) from
>> > > FreeBSD.  I suggest the driver is marked as deprecated in 11.x and
>> > > removed from 12.0, as was done for other drivers recently.  Some
>> > > background and rationale:
>> > >
>> > > The drm2 driver was the original port of a KMS driver to FreeBSD.  It
>> > > was done by Konstantin Belousov to support Intel graphics cards, and
>> > > later extended by Jean-Sébastien Pédron as well as Konstantin to match
>> > > what's in Linux 3.8.  This included unstable support from Haswell, but
>> > > nothing newer than that.
>> > >
>> > > For quite some time now we have had the graphics/drm-stable-kmod and
>> > > graphics/drm-next-kmods which provides support for modern AMD and Intel
>> > > graphics cards.  These ports, together with the linuxkpi, or lkpi, has
>> > > made it significantly easier to port and update our graphics drivers.
>> > > Further, these new drivers cover the same drivers as the old drm2
>> driver.
>> > >
>> > > What does the community think?  Is there anyone still using the drm2
>> > > driver on 12-CURRENT?  If so, what is preventing you from switching to
>> > > the port?
>> > >
>> > > Thank you
>> > > Regards
>> > > --
>> > > Niclas Zeising
>> > > FreeBSD x11/graphics team
>> > > _______________________________________________
>> > > freebsd-current at freebsd.org mailing list
>> > > https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current
>> > > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-current-unsubscribe@
>> freebsd.org"
>> > >
>> >
>> > Sounds good ( deprecate resp remove ). It causes more confusion and
>> > problems and it solves nothing.
>> >
>>
>> Check the Makefiles
>>
>> % more /usr/ports/graphics/drm-next-kmod/Makefile
>>
>> ONLY_FOR_ARCHS= amd64
>> ONLY_FOR_ARCHS_REASON=  the new KMS components are only supported on amd64
>>
>> Not to ia32 friendly.
>>
> 
> So do people use i386 for desktop? And need the latest KMS stuff?

I use it on my Pentium-M laptop.  I don't need the latest KMS stuff, but
I do need X11 so that I can use a browser, vncviewer, and a few terminal
windows.  Falling back to VESA resolution would suck.  It's currently
running 11.0-STABLE. I'm planning on migrating everything over to 12.0
sometime after 12.0-RELEASE.

I have one other i386-class machine, but it only needs a text console.
Everything else here is amd64.