Re: DRM/KMS

[tlaronde%polynum.com@localhost]

Le Fri, Jul 07, 2023 at 03:08:25PM +0100, David Brownlee a écrit :
> On Fri, 7 Jul 2023 at 15:03, Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Jul 07, 2023 at 02:30:14PM +0100, David Brownlee wrote:
> > > drm/kms definitely is hugely complicated, overly Linux focussed, and
> > > difficult to maintain and update. A lot of effort has been put into
> > > getting it to run on NetBSD (and updating from previous versions), but
> > > it's currently the only viable game in town.
> >
> > I also thing it is not *that* far away from working fine.
> >
> > The releng wiki page lists a bunch of PRs against it, but those are mostly
> > hard to fix because the problem only happens on *some* hardware, and
> > sometimes only in special scenarios (e.g. serial console used and the
> > monitor powered on during drm/kms attaching).
> >
> > That it all is a mess we probably all agree with.
> >
> > And this will require more updates, every year - GPU hardware does
> > evolve, and available options change.
> >
> > Using no drm/kms is a good alternative (and works great on NetBSD in general).
> > But you loose WebGL and sometimes accalerated video playback, and also
> > often support for mulitple displays (but that part might even be easy to fix).
> 
> So far some good changes (cribbing shamelessly from other suggestions) might be:
> - Implement "boot -D" (or similar) to boot with all DRM disabled, to
> make it easier for hardware with issues
> - Allow optionally initialising DRM after boot and transferring
> console ownership (may add more work in future upgrades, but works
> well with above item :)
> - Rework wsdisplay to try to reduce abstraction violations and make it
> cleaner to work with
> - Looking at issues with certain hardware (can probably find systems
> to ship if anyone is interested...)

The 1), 2) and a part of 3) is what I have in mind for the first step.

As far as I'm concerned, I will not help to "fix" the present state of DRM/KMS
since for me the amount of work already needed to try to make the thing work is
out of proportion and will have to be doubled the next time; this is, already
and even more so for the future, hopeless.

So I maintain the offer and thanks David Brownlee for the offer to send
me the CVS (and yes, the git and hg would be worth too) but since I try
to make a small donation every year to NetBSD it will not "cost" me
something I was not already planning to give, so I ask the core to make
the estimation and once I have donated, if David is doing the work, to
make things so that at least, he gets back what it has costed him to
make and send me the copy I have requested.
-- 
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
                    http://kertex.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C