DRM removal soon

John Baldwin jhb at FreeBSD.org
Thu Feb 28 21:54:58 UTC 2019


On 2/28/19 1:06 PM, Steve Kargl wrote:
> I suppose it is the bane of those of who cannot afford
> new hardware every 2 or 3 years.

This is a bit of an exaggeration.  I just replaced my previous
laptop (Thinkpad x220 from 2011 that I bought used in probably
2013 or so) with a Lenovo X1 from this year (which requires
drm-kmod-current).  That's a span of 5 years.  Note that
the in-tree drm2 drivers won't work on laptops made since
around 2015 or so.

> I haven't looked at what the drm-fbsd11.2-kmod or 12.0 mean.  I assume
> that these are the ports for 11-stable and 12-stable, and I assume
> that these work on those specific stable branches.  If that is the
> case, then there is no support needed by graphics teams unless a 
> src committer merges somethings from -current that breaks stability.
> If the MFC is a security fix, then the graphics teams may need to
> asked about helping troubleshoot the 11.2 and 12.0 kmods; otherwise,
> then MFC should not happen if it breaks stability.  Or, perhaps, 
> I have a s different definition of 'stable.

I think one of the issues that isn't clear is that there are other
ports involved than just the drm-kmod ports.  The various x11 driver
ports (xf86-video-*) use the DRM APIs.  Newer versions of those
packages only work with newer versions of DRM, and newer versions of
other things like KDE depend on newer versions of X libraries, etc.
It actually ends up being a far larger ball of mud at the bottom of
the hill than just the drm-kmod ports in terms of the dependencies
affected by keeping older versions of DRM around.

In your case, I am hopeful that using an amd64 kernel with an i386
chroot is going to give you an overall better experience by giving
you more stable kernel support as well as the ability to test libm
for both i386 and amd64 on the same machine.

-- 
John Baldwin


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