Re: F37 Change: Legacy Xorg Driver Removal (System-Wide Change proposal)

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Hi,

On 4/8/22 07:01, Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:
> Ben Cotton wrote:
>> == Owner ==
>> * Name: [[User:ajax|Adam Jackson]]
>> * Email: ajax@xxxxxxxxxx
>>
>> == Detailed Description ==
>>
>> Fedora's primary desktop environments are moving away from being X11
>> sessions, to being Wayland servers in their own right. This transition
>> is incomplete, and the Xorg server is still potentially used in a
>> variety of "fallback" situations. In particular the `vesa` and `fbdev`
>> drivers can find themselves pressed into use when accelerated graphics
>> is unavailable. Both of these drivers are somewhat deprecated
>> upstream, and the code to reach them is increasingly fragile as it
>> gets exercised less and less.
>>
>> This change will identify the remaining configurations that can reach
>> these drivers, establish an alternative for display support for each
>> configuration, and then remove the drivers and their support code in
>> xserver.
> 
> Removing the fallback drivers that (almost) always work strikes me as an 
> extraordinarily bad idea. It will knowingly desupport any graphics hardware 
> not covered by the main drivers and it may turn out to unknowingly desupport 
> even more hardware, where the hardware-specific drivers that should work 
> actually do not. It also means that there will be no workaround at all if 
> the native driver is temporarily broken on the given hardware for whatever 
> reason. Hence, I am strongly opposed to this change.

Note that for Fedora 36 we have already dropped efifb and replaced it
with simpledrm:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/ReplaceFbdevDrivers

So this means that in our default configs we no longer have any
fbdev drivers active.

And simpledrm can also be used with the kernels builtin vesa support
on legacy BIOS systems, so in essence starting with F36 we will always
have a drm/kms node available for the Xorg modesetting to bind to.

With the above Fedora *36* change in place the fbdev/vesa drivers
will be practically completely unused, so I don't really expect
any problems from this change.

As for odd hw out there, a lot of work has been the last couple
of years to make sure that we have drm/kms drivers for almost all
hw out there, esp. also focusing on weird server hw VGA cards.

So most hw will either be new enough to offer an efifb which
simpledrm will turn into a drm/kms /dev/dri/card0 device. Or it
will be old enough that it almost certainly will have
a drm/kms driver.

And for the really odd duck out a vesa mode can be set on the kernel
cmdline which simpledrm should then pick up:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/svga.html
https://www.systutorials.com/configuration-of-linux-kernel-video-mode/

So I believe that this change is fine.

Regards,

Hans
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