Re: What is evdev and autoloading?

From: Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert_at_cschubert.com>
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2019 08:17:48 -0800
On February 18, 2019 9:17:37 AM PST, Pete Wright <pete_at_nomadlogic.org> wrote:
>
>
>On 2/18/19 8:50 AM, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
>>> On Mon, Feb 18, 2019 at 9:12 AM Rodney W. Grimes <
>>>
>>> I don't know. I think the fact that drm2 doesn't support anything
>newer
>>> than 5-year-old hardware is a pretty convincing evidence that the
>old way
>>> is broken and doesn't work.
>> But it DOES work, I am pretty sure we have 1000's of users on that 5
>year
>> old hardware that are totally happy with the intree DRM2 that is in
>stable/12,
>> and some of whom have ventured into head/13 are having issues with
>thete a
>> "new" model (ie kmod broken by a base commit).  I know that there is
>wip
>> to get CI coverage for that, but wip is wip, and we need to start
>changing
>> the cart horse driver order we keep doing and get things right.  Port
>> up and working, with CI testing *before* we go remove kmod'ed code
>from
>> base would be a much more appropriate path.
>>
>> I think one serious problem here is the summary dismissal of things
>> simply on the "5 year old" basis.  Not everyone, and infact few now
>> a days other than corporate buyers, can afford new hardware,
>> giving the minimal performance increase in systems over the last 5
>> years the cost/benifit factor of a new computer is just too low.
>I've put a lot of effort helping test and document how to get a usable 
>desktop environment on a modern laptop.  there were two issues which 
>motivated me to do this:
>
>1) my observation that many developers at conferences and online were 
>using macOS as their primary desktop environment.  when comparing this 
>to the OpenBSD and Linux community I felt pretty embarrassed, but it
>did 
>explain the stagnant nature of our graphics subsystem.  people seemed 
>afraid to touch things due the brittle nature of its hardware support.

I noticed this too. And every time it struck me as odd.

>
>2) i was in need to an *affordable* machine with a warranty.
>fortunately 
>there are many affordable laptops at staples, best-buy and amazon - but
>
>they were all post haswell systems, rendering them basically useless 
>from a FreeBSD perspective.

Which is why removing drm2 was necessary. 

>
>after trying to get traction to update the in-tree drm subsystem i was 
>lucky enough to sync up with the graphics team which was working on 
>syncing things up with modern hardware support.  because of that i'm
>now 
>able to get my small startup pretty much all on board with FreeBSD.  i 
>use it on my workstations as well as on or server infrastructure 
>(physical and AWS).  i would consider this a success for our community 
>as it's opened up the eyes to a whole new generation of devs to
>FreeBSD.
>
>one thing missing from all of these arguments is real data.  how many 
>people are on haswell era hardware?  i can tell from my experience the 
>past several years the number of people who have post-haswell gear seem
>
>to be more numerous, or at least more vocal (and frankly easier to work
>
>with while squashing bugs).
>
>i can also say that personally it would be great to improve support for
>
>systems requiring drm2 - but that gear is hard to come by, so we are 
>really dependent on helpful collaboration from those who are being
>effected.

Drm2 is not required. My current laptop is 5 years old, an HD3000. The previous one is 13 years old, i915. Both work perfectly with drm-current on 13-current. Franky, I don't see what the fuss is about.


>
>
>-pete
>
>-- 
>Pete Wright
>pete_at_nomadlogic.org
>_at_nomadlogicLA
>
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The only irritation with drm-current is after doing a NO_CLEAN build ARC is large enough that on occasion a video may not play because X is unable to get the memory. Other than that it works better than drm-legacy -- with no artifacts.

-- 
Pardon the typos and autocorrect, small keyboard in use.
Cheers,
Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert_at_cschubert.com>
FreeBSD UNIX: <cy_at_FreeBSD.org> Web: http://www.FreeBSD.org

	The need of the many outweighs the greed of the few.
Received on Tue Feb 19 2019 - 15:18:22 UTC

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