On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 2:19 PM, Carsten Mattner <carstenmattner@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 5:11 PM, Eric Blau <eblau@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 12:29 PM, Carsten Mattner via arch-general >> <arch-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> There's a fix that's been submitted to the tip, but no effort has >> been made to patch the bug in the 4.10.x stable series. It seems the >> devs don't care about having a stable kernel to use, only about >> moving forward the tip and staying on the bleeding edge. Shouldn't >> at least showstopper kernel panics be patched to the "stable" >> release? >> >> I requested a fix on the tip to be patched in the 4.9.x stable >> series a couple months ago because I tested the fix myself and >> verified it "worked for me" but it was subsequently reverted. I'm >> sure I don't know enough about the i915 driver to be able to make >> these types of decisions about what should or should not be patched >> other than to help with testing, but it would be nice if the i915 >> dev team made an effort to propagate fixes to stable as well. > > It's possible that the fix causes other issues, but I've also seen > crash fixes take very long until landing in a stable release, > sometimes taking 2 or 3 releases, while refactorings are intertwined > with other fixes in stable releases. It looks odd. Yes, agreed here. The fix I requested to be patched to 4.9.x when it was the stable release back in the Feb/March timeframe was from September 2016 but still hadn't made it into a stable release 5 or 6 months later. > I wonder how the situation is with AMD and nVidia GPUs with open and > closed driver stacks. I don't have these problems with a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 on my desktop machine. > It seems that if you run GNOME3 with GTK3 under Wayland and only GTK3 > apps with GDK_BACKEND=wayland and no X app, then it works well, but > that's like forcing everyone to use just Android apps under ChromeOS. > > With libweston and libweston-desktop and further fixes in Xwayland, > maybe 2018 we will finally have what Wayland promised very long ago. I > wouldn't blame outsiders if they looked at Linux Desktop and thought > that there's too many variants and too much change with little > stabilization going on. A big reason why Linux Desktop seems like a lost cause. > Then there's outstandingly stable software like GNU Emacs, FVWM, xterm > or XMonad. Your config from a decade or two ago still works and with > minimal to none deprecation disruption. I prefer stable software that lets me get my job done like i3, vim, etc. I rarely have problems running the latest versions included in Arch. The kernel is another story altogether. I frequently have to switch between linux and linux-lts or build my own kernel with various patches in order for my machines to run stable. > So when it comes to open source video driver stacks, the best stragey > is running one of the last two generations of GPU (Broadwell and > Skylake) and always stay in thet range since older GPUs lose QA > coverage with new GPUs coming out. If the capabilities of a GPU are > clear and you cannot expect to have newer OpenGL support in a newer > Mesa, then it would make sense to have a stable but old i915 stack for > old GPUs that doesn't change vs new i915 stack for newer GPUs, but > Linux is a monolithic design without driver ABIs for good reasons that > show their disadvantage when QA is insufficient. My 2015 Broadwell-based MacBook Pro is not that old, yet I have i915 issues with it almost kernel release. -Eric
