Re: i915drm broken in 9.1?

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

Thanks again for the very helpful replies!

>> Would the presence of i915drmkms cause i915drm to fail to _compile_?
> Yes.  There are two DRM code bases defining various symbols like
> drm_ioctl, drm_open, &c.; the i915drm driver uses the old legacy one
> and the i915drmkms driver uses the new one.  These code bases cannot
> coexist in the same kernel.

That would cause it to fail to _link_, not to fail to _compile_, no?

They're seeing errors like "u8 undefined", where looking at the code
makes it clear u8 is expected to be a typedef.

>> The reason i915 support is a suspect is the boot-time message from
>> i915_firmware_load_error_print about CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE or "your
>> initrd/initramfs image"
> This only affects runtime power management, which NetBSD's drivers
> currently don't support anyway.  These firmware images are optional.

I'll pass that along.  Thank you!

> Have you tried NetBSD 10?

No.  There is work in progress to move the whole thing to Linux (my
understanding is that the major reason for this is relatively automatic
support for a wider range of video hardware, secondarily that the
people taking over the project are far more used to Linux than to
NetBSD).  The 9.1 issue in question comes from trying to support the
9.1 version for the existing installed base until the Linux version is
ready to ship.

> You can just try booting a NetBSD 10 kernel once, no need to install
> the 10 userland.

Sorry, there are significant changes to the kernel involved.  A few of
them border on trivial but still necessary (eg, "options HZ=8000"),
some less so (I made significant changes to the lpt driver, to give it
a userland API that can be used as a parallel port instead of a printer
interface, and I wrote a driver for the Adlink 7300A).

> Can you share any other symptoms like dmesg, maybe with boot -vx?

I can get that for boots in the lab here, yes, but that's not with the
problem manifesting.  It would be much more difficult to get useful
information like that for the customer installation that actually
manifests the problem.  (The problem is that the monitor is completely
blank when the application is running.  There is plenty of evidence
that it actually is running, though; it talks to external hardware as
well as displaying stuff.  It's not just that the monitor can't handle
1280x1024, though; a much older application release runs under DOS at
1280x1024 and works fine.)

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