[RFC] Deprecation and removal of the drm2 driver

[Thomas Mueller]

> Wow, this blew up quite a lot bigger than I anticipated.  I'll try to
> summarize the discussion a bit below and then suggest a way forward.

> The primary reasons we want to do this is because there are conflicts between
> the new drm drivers in ports, and the drm drivers in base, since they control
> the same hardware.  It is hard to make conflicting drivers to auto load in a
> consistent way.  In order to improve the desktop experience I'd like to see
> that graphics drivers are loaded on system boot.  There is also a push from
> upstream to have the xf86-video* drivers stop loading driver kernel modules.
> It is also easier to keep a port updated than keeping the base system updated,
> and updates can propagate to multiple FreeBSD versions at once.  This will
> also ensure that all ports use the same firmware blobs.

> So, to the summary.  A lot of people are using i386, and as such still need
> the old drm drivers.  There were also some reports about issues with the
> drm-next/stable drivers, which needs investigating. Power is another
> architecture that also is not supported by drm-next/stable, although we hope
> to extend support to powerpc in the future. There was a lot of discussion
> regarding making it into a port, or only excluding the driver on amd64, and
> similar suggestions.

> To move forward, we'll do the following:  Note that this is for current only.
> We take the drm and drm2 drivers and make a port for it, maintained by the
> graphics team (x11@).  After a transition period, then the drivers are removed
> from base.  At the same time, pkg-messages are added to relevant places to
> point people to the various available drm drivers.

> Regards

> Niclas Zeising
> FreeBSD graphics/x11 team

One reason I can think of to maintain i386 compatibility is to be able to run wine and possibly other software that requires i386 compatibility.

That said, I currently have no active FreeBSD i386 installation, and probably won't get around to it anytime soon.

I believe Linux can run wine on an amd64 multilib installation, but FreeBSD is not up to that yet.

For the above purpose, keeping drm and drm2 as a port might be good enough, as opposed to being part of base.

i386 is not dead.  While some Linux distros (such as Arch) and DragonFlyBSD have quit i386 support, Haiku maintains 32-bit support to be able to run old BeOS software as well as newer things. 

Tom