On Thursday 04 March 2010 18:53:32 Linus Torvalds wrote: > > On Fri, 5 Mar 2010, Dave Airlie wrote: > > > > I'm not saying it doesn't happen in other drivers from time to time, but > > when it does its treated as regression, for nouveau and STAGING that > > isn't what the Nouveau project (which Stephane mostly speaks for) seems > > to want at this stage. > > The problem with "at this stage" is that the stage has apparently been > on-going for several years. > > Even if Stepane doesn't care, people inside RedHat/Fedora must care. Are > you guys simply planning on never supporting F12 with 2.6.34? I'd expect > it to be a _major_ pain to have that whole hardcoded "X and kernel must > always change in lockstep". > > And the sad part is, it would be so nice if the X server would just dlopen > the right thing automatically, so that the low-level driver wouldn't even > need to care. It already does the whole "discover which driver to load" > part, wouldn't it be nice if that code had automatic versioning too, and > then a low-level driver really wouldn't have to care, everything would > automatically do the right thing just when the version changes. > > Of course, the distro would still have to make all the different versions > of libdrm available to users, but now updating one wouldn't screw over the > others. So if you had a known-good setup with nouveau-0.0.15, you could > install a nouveau-0.0.16 thing and _know_ that it won't affect that > previous install at all. > > And yeah, I realize that those version numbers are "wrong". Normal library > versioning rules about patchlevel not changing semantics are obviously > broken here. But maybe the rules could even try to first start with the > exact version, ie do a "driver-x.y.z.so" load, then a "driver-x.y.so" > load, then a "driver-x.so" load and finally a "driver.so" load. > > But I guess that nothing even does that drmGetVersion() until the nouveau > driver has already been loaded. Which kind of forces the low-level drivers > to do any such versioning on their own. > > But wouldn't it be nice if something like this was done at a higher level, > so that the drivers really wouldn't even need to care?
Why not support a _minimal_ ABI that will always let X start with nouveau? Having X working does not mean that all forms of acceleration have to work too. If X starts, even if is slow, users can easily check logs which should have a message saying 'ABI change - upgrade your ...'. Thoughts? Ed Tomlinson ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
