[RFC] Deprecation and removal of the drm2 driver

[Kevin Bowling]

32b compat is quite different than i386 arch.  It makes sense to
maintain 32b compat for quite a while.

On Wed, May 30, 2018 at 3:33 AM, Thomas Mueller <mueller6722 at twc.com> wrote:
>> 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
>
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