>> >> Its nouveau project not X not DRM, stop generalising the situation. > > Is it really just nouveau? I've not looked, but I bet the intel driver and > the radeon driver have _exactly_ the same "oh, I'm the wrong version, I > will now kill myself" behavior. > > I certainly seem to remember some similar issues with the intel driver > long long ago. > > What would happen if I changed DRIVER_PATCHLEVEL to 1 for the i915 driver? > Would it try to handle it gracefully? Or are we in the same situation that > the intel driver guys can never fix anything fundamental without doing a > whole flag day?
Patchlevel never changed in intel, but if you changed the MINOR back to 1 then shit would break, exactly like any userspace shared library. It'll fall over in userspace, because userspace has minimum versioning requirements same as if you change all the udev interfaces back 6 years nothing boots anymore, or you remove the wireless interfaces or xattrs from ext3. I thin The standard DRM versioning interface is MAJOR - don't change this ever except for second coming. Radeon KMS is the only driver to have bumped this interface version, and we still support the 1.0.0 if you turn off modesetting. Mach64 bumped it once but we never upstreamed either version. MINOR - optionally bump this when you add a new API, new feature, new chipset, now we generally just add a new GETPARAM, which the userspace can check for and do the correct thing. PATCHLEVEL - ideally bump this for small non-user visible changes, in practice nobody touches this ever. Nouveau have "abused" this to provide pre 1.0.0 version number, when they release version 1.0.0 they are expected to follow standard drm versioning rules. Now just like in userspace, if you add features to the minor number, userspace driver will come to depend on these features being there. If you dropped the intel minor to 1.1 it would crap itself all over the place, same as if you starting trying to ship glibc2.0 on a glibc2.1 distro. We have never worried about new userspaces running on really old kernels, because generally 3-4 years has been good enough for distros. This is a nouveau problem not a drm problem. Dave. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev -- _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel