[RFC] Deprecation and removal of the drm2 driver

[Ian FREISLICH]

Niclas


On 05/18/2018 01:58 PM, Niclas Zeising wrote:
> [ Cross posted to freebsd-current@ and freebsd-x11 at .  Please respect 
> reply-to and send all replies to freebsd-x11 at .  Thanks! ]
>
>
> Hi!
> 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?

I'm running -CURRENT on all my systems.  I have a "3rd Gen" HD Graphics 
4000 that I'm running drm-next on but I'm about to revert to drm2 
because of instabilities.  Xorg spontaneously crashes, and doesn't on 
drm2. I also have a Haswell system running drm2 which I have not tried 
drm-next because SWMBO is particularly intolerant of stuff not working.

I also ran drm-next successfully on a Sunrise Point-LP system with 
"Intel UHD Graphics 620" because drm2 didn't support the graphics chip 
before switching to linux to get the trackpad and sound working.

I guess the situation is that your mileage may vary depending on your 
system.  I'm OK with installing drm2 from ports, but at this point I'm 
not really OK with loosing drm2 at this stage because of the instability 
in drm-next on my one system.

Ian

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