Graphics Team Meeting notes from 2018-10-17

[Greg V]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 7:14 AM, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> The graphics team has started having regular conference calls to keep
> things moving along and to expand the knowledge base of graphics and
> graphics issues. To that end, I'll be taking notes during these 
> meetings
> and publishing them here. This is an experiment, so please send me 
> feedback
> on how useful you find this.

Much better than the usual silence :)

> We plan on abstracting this down into the quarterly reports as well.
> 
> Warner
> 
> 2018-10-17:
>       Mesa 18.2 is out and there is a patch submitted to update the 
> port
>       (pr 230298). It’s been lightly tested by submitter, but needs 
> more
>       extensive testing since we’ve had issue in the past with 
> incomplete
>       testing. It’s unclear that we have to have 18.2, and it 
> represents a big
>       risk on the 12.0R timeline. Definitely want to do it post 
> 12.0R, however.
>       -

Maybe users should be able to choose between mesa-stable and mesa-dev?

I'm not sure if there's a good way to do it in the current 
ports/packages system though.

I just 'pkg add -f' my own development mesa ( 
https://github.com/myfreeweb/freebsd-ports-dank/blob/master/graphics/mesa-dev/Makefile 
) to let it just overwrite the mesa-libs/mesa-dri packages, but that's 
obviously terrible.

Arch Linux's pacman can have a package "provide" multiple packages, 
which allows it to cleanly replace them: 
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/mesa-git/
I haven't found a similar feature in pkg :(

>    Wayland
>    -
> 
>       Was updated w/o approval from the graphics team. Not worth 
> fighting
>       to revert, but now requires EVDEV in the kernel now).
>       -

libwayland does not require evdev. libwayland, by design, does not know 
what evdev even is. libwayland is just an IPC library.
Only the actual compositors use evdev (through libinput in pretty much 
all known implementations).

About the only thing in this update was moving libwayland-egl to the 
wayland package, and thus shipping it to everyone, which massively 
alleviated the pain inflicted on other ports by the lack of it.
No more ugly "if Mesa was built with WAYLAND" conditionals in 
*everything*.
Worse than ugly, these conditionals required anyone who wanted to use 
Wayland to *rebuild* said everything.
FINALLY that's not an issue, and the only things Wayland users are 
required to rebuild are kernel and Mesa.

>    input stack
>    -
>       There are reports of regression with things like ddb> prompt 
> that
>       need to be investigated before people will be comfortable
> turning EVDEV on
>       by default in GENERIC.
>       -

A fix for the keyboard deadlock has been posted back in April:
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D15070

I've been running EVDEV on two machines since EVDEV was a thing 
(without the patch) and never encountered any deadlocks or any other 
bugs.

Would be a great shame if 12.0 releases without EVDEV in GENERIC.