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

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On 4/8/22 05:02, Hans de Goede wrote:
> 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.

Dropping fbdev is fine if there is nothing using it.

> 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.

That’s okay so long as the modes can be switched at runtime.

> 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:

If this could be made runtime configurable I would be fine with this
change.
-- 
Sincerely,
Demi Marie Obenour (she/her/hers)
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