> I just think this is a giant amount of work to save 70K of memory (by
> allowing a setup which avoids loading fbdev) on desktop x86 machines.
> It is much simpler to just treat fbdev as the bottom layer and have
> two tiers instead of three.
> Wouldn't it be easier to just debug the 12 fbdev drivers that have
> corresponding DRM drivers to load on the x86? We started doing that
> with radeon and found two bugs, one was fixed in 24hrs and the other
> there is insufficient info about the specific laptop model to know
> what is failing. It's not like the 12 fbdev drivers are chock full of
> bugs, they are used routinely on other platforms.
You haven't seen intelfb then, it is a train wreck of code and I've no
idea if it works on most chipsets, it certainly will blow up with wierd
BIOS configs and funny screen, I won't load it on any platform as-is..
it mainly gives us
a) some semblance of backwards compatibility for people
who don't want their system to break when fbdev is loaded but do want a
DRM..
b) a step by step path forward as opposed to big breakage path,
1. make radeon fbdev sit on top of stub driver do nothing with
drm. - merge to kernel test it, make sure nothing breaks..
2. start hooking radeon DRM into mix, but only small things, merge
to kernel, prove nothing breaks..
3. next step etc..
Us "kernel" people like to have a lots of merge to kernel points where we
add no new functionality just scaffolding but make sure we don't remove
any either... its like building anything, you can't call scaffolding a
waste of time even though you might remove it all in the end...
Dave.
--
David Airlie, Software Engineer
http://www.skynet.ie/~airlied / airlied at skynet.ie
Linux kernel - DRI, VAX / pam_smb / ILUG
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