Re: What to do with base X11 for netbsd-9 ?

[Robert Swindells <rjs%fdy2.co.uk@localhost>]

Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost> wrote:
>I would like to get your feedback about the current state of the base X11,
>as there have been lots of threads about various issues and I have lost
>the overview of what works in -current and what does not.

>We *really* need to branch netbsd-9 very soon now, and it is unclear (at
>least to me) what should happen to the in-tree X11 version.

> - we have very obvious display bugs at first sight in xdm
> - self hosting builds on 4 GB amd64 machines are not really possible
>   any more (due to LLVM runtime dependencies, which can not even be
>   disabled at build time right now)
> - reports here (and on other lists) about display problems and success
>   stories have no clear winner (but probably due to me losing track)

>So what is you story/opinion: is base X11 usable in -current? If not,
>what needs to be done or what hardware needs fixes?

I'm typing this using radeon on -current, don't see any problems but
only have an old CEDAR GPU. Get errors on firefox startup of:

  libGL error: unable to load driver: r600_dri.so
  libGL error: driver pointer missing
  libGL error: failed to load driver: r600
  libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so
  libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast

Intel - Only have an i915 machine, display itself seems fine but no
HW acceleration for video playback. Wondering if the driver expects a
different SW stack between the video player and itself. Video playback
was fine with both the older driver and the intel.old one.

NVidia - Only have an old laptop with an NV44. Seems to be using the
nouveau driver. Video playback works but looks like it is SW only.
Don't see any display problems, glxgears runs.

I don't use xdm on any of these systems. I just start X11 as a normal
user, did try starting it as root on my pinebook to verify a bug report
and got a black desktop instead of the standard pattern.

I did agree to try to update the radeon microcode in the tree but ran
into a problem that there are two versions of some files, one named in
uppercase the other lowercase, not tracked down yet how & why they
differ.