Re: What is evdev and autoloading?

W dniu 18.02.2019 o 18:17, Pete Wright pisze:
>
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
Thank you for reworking laptop hardware support, it has been improved a
lot lately. Nowadays almost everything works out of the box. In my case
things not working, for a brand new laptop, had patches in the review
and available to download from FreeBSD Phabricator. Laptop support is
the key to gain popularity of the OS, especially among the younger
generation of users.

From the other hand, I am not able to boot 12.0 RELEASE on a couple of
~10 years old servers, though I still can actively follow 11-STABLE
there. It's not easy to find the cause of the breakage.

I'd like to encourage you Developers to MFC as much as we can handle
into the STABLE branch to involve even more users into the software
testing process. Breaking ABI is unacceptable, but brave MFC would
sometimes help the community avoid/reduce a gap between STABLE and
CURRENT which accumulates and appears in the final of the release cycle.

With best regards,

-- 
Marek Zarychta