Re: drm / drm2 removal in 12

Hi Owen

I'm truly sorry you feel this way about our work.

At first I was thinking "I'm not going to feed the troll" but after giving
what you're writing some more thought it seems maybe you have misunderstood
some things that I want to clarify to make sure there's no misunderstanding
by you or any one else reading this.

There are almost 30,000 ports now in the ports tree. Many are ported from
various operating systems. Many are from Linux, GPL'd and in most cases we
depend on them for running the graphical desktop of our choice on FreeBSD.

However, these ports are all optional. You don't have to install any of
them if you don't want to, this includes the new generation GPU drivers and
LinuxKPI.  Linux is not "moving in to" the FreeBSD kernel.

For those of you who want a "pure" BSD experience, running without X is
just fine, or finding a pure BSD solution if one exists. For those who
don't want Linux derived graphics drivers (which by the way the ones in
sys/dev/drm2/ also are), nothing is forcing you to use them. Vesa of scfb
works beautifully for a software rendered graphical user interface. Nvidia
provides a native driver for FreeBSD if you have their hardware.

CURRENT breaks sometimes, not only because of graphics. This is the nature
of bleeding edge but we work hard to keep breakage to a minimal. For those
of you who wish to run a more stable system, use a stable release.

The graphics team at FreeBSD has new members and we're still trying to find
our way regarding release schedule, support and other things. It's still a
WIP and the road has been bumpy. There is still a lot to do for us to catch
up and be able to provide a consistent experience for everyone.

Again, we're doing the best we can with the resources we have. There's no
way the few developers we have could develop and maintain native GPU
drivers, spanning 20 years on three different hardware platforms.
Especially considering how fast moving target the graphics hardware is.

I know nothing I say matters to you, Owen, but your comments are quite
extreme and contain false doomsday propaganda.. This mail is more to
provide some information from the graphics team for anyone reading this so
they don't fall for false propaganda.


On Sat, Aug 25, 2018 at 12:45 PM blubee blubeeme <gurenchan_at_gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 25, 2018 at 5:09 PM Stefan Hagen <
> sh+freebsd-current_at_codevoid.de>
> wrote:
>
> > blubee blubeeme wrote:
> > > On Sat, Aug 25, 2018 at 7:43 AM Kris Moore <kris_at_ixsystems.com>wrote:
> > >> I've been personally using the new DRM bits since almost day one. I
> > >> haven't found it to be unstable in the slightest. Compared to not
> > >> having it and being forced to run 5+ year old hardware, it's been a
> > >> huge blessing for those of us who care about running FreeBSD as a
> > >> modern desktop / laptop.
> > >>
> > >> FreeBSD being an open source project, you are welcome to contribute
> > >> back your work anytime. But since I don't imagine we'll see that
> > >> patch coming anytime soon, I'll stick with this new LinuxKPI-powered,
> > >> Plasma-desktop running awesomeness.
> > >>
> > >> (Written from my brand new Lenovo P71 which worked flawlessly out of
> > >> box)
> > >
> > > Please tell me more about you're modern hardware, Kris Vice President
> > > of Engineering at iXsystems.
> > >
> > > Try asking a person who doesn't run server infrastructure software and
> > > hardware to get that stuff up and running, would you?
> >
> > Do you want to ask me? I'm mostly a private individual and linux/debian
> > user that got fed up with the Linux fragmentation and direction of
> > development (from a user perspective). I found my new home in FreeBSD.
> > I migrated my (hobby) root server and have a few jails up and running
> > and doing random stuff on them for myself and friends.
> >
> > Key to this was that I was able to get FreeBSD up and running on my
> > Laptop - with the drm-next kmod - and use it daily to get used to it and
> > learn about it. Actually it was a pain in the ass because back then I
> > had to learn how to make -current run and even worse, I had to use the
> > drm-next graphics branch from a github repository which wasn't even
> > on the main FreeBSD account. I was forced to update the kernel every
> > once in a while because the pkg update would complain otherwise. It
> > frequently broke and I had to deal with it and learn how to recover it.
> >
> > The alternative would have been to go back to Linux, which has a whole
> > lot more to complain about. So I stayed. And I'm happy with it.
> >
> > I accepted all this trouble to have decent graphics support. In all
> > the time I had to fight -current issues a lot more than anything
> > drm/graphics related. This stuff was always stable for me.
> >
> > I saw a few people trying out FreeBSD. And the first thing after the
> > Installation is always: Graphics and Wifi. That's what people need.
> >
> > These are "desktop needs", where supporting new hardware fast is more
> > important than being rock stable and feature complete.
> >
> > Just my 2 cents,
> > Stefan
> >
> > --
> > Stefan Hagen
> > Mail: sh_at_codevoid.de | encryption key in header.
> > gopher://codevoid.de | https://codevoid.de
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> >
> Like you said you're doing hobby work, that's fine. Take the time to test
> that bleeding edge stuff on a branch somewhere.
>
> You guys cannot expect reasonable people who have machines running
> production code to have to deal with that type of nonsense that you just
> described.
>
> You left Linux because it's an unorganized mess, FreeBSD is not Linux.
> There are clear rules and restrictions if you guys cannot understand this
> then this is just a waste of time.
>
> FreeBSD is server first and while that may suck for hobbyist at first, once
> you understand that people who run servers do not care about graphics as
> much as hobbyist do they need a reliable core.
>
> The linuxkpi stuff the total antithesis of what I understand to be the
> FreeBSD philosophy. Try reading it again:
> https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/nutshell.html
>
> You guys can't expect to destroy the stability for everyone because a few
> hobbyist who volunteer in their free time want to wreck the system.
>
> Work on your code to improve the quality instead of trying to turn the
> FreeBSD kernel into a thin wrapper around Linux kernel. Solve the
> engineering problems instead of asking for quick fix solutions.
>
> Any of you linuxkpi guys who are pushing this, what will be enough?
>
> Haven't you guys gotten enough leeway from the core team?
> How many breaking changes do you want to introduce to the FreeBSD kernel vs
> engineering your software to work well within the existing infrastructure?
>
> Which one of you guys dare to stand up and define a goal?
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