Mark out-of-tree DDX drivers as deprecated/unrecomended #430
stefan11111
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2 RFCs of the Core Team
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I think this is more of an idea and needs some discussion. I therefore move this to X11Libre 2 Rfcs Of The Core Team · Discussions · GitHub. |
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By DDX you actually mean xf86 drivers, correct ? Are you proposing to deprecate actually all out-of-tree (not in xserver.git repo) drivers or just those not hosted & maintained by us ? |
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Describe the update
I described most of my reasoning for this in: X11Libre/xserver#449 (comment)
Other that fbdev, vesa, and equivalents for non-linux (framebuffer drivers mostly, int10 should work the same regardless of os), all of the out-of-tree DDX drivers, as far as I am aware, are userspace modesetting drivers which are writing bytes into memory-mapped (or worse, port-mapped) I/O.
Because of this, these drivers are unmaintainable without vendor support, and reading the code requires vendor-specific spec sheets which might not even exist.
Vendors, and the entire linux graphics world in general is moving to kernel modesetting, where these drivers are actually maintained and everything is expose through pretty, vendor-agnostic interfaces (libdrm, libgbm, etc).
Ideally, we would get everything working flawlessly through the modesetting driver.
Sadly, we live in the real world, where, even if vendors start embracing kernel modesetting, old hw that doesn't have kernel modesetting drivers doesn't just disappear.
I'm not proposing any code changes, other that cosmetic ones perhaps.
I think we should get the word to people that these drivers see far less maintenance than the in-tree modesetting driver and the kernel-space drivers, and that these drivers have very few eyes on them, and even fewer eyes that can/want to fix them if something goes wrong.
To not ignore the elephant in the room, the nvidia DDX driver is already marked as deprecated and fills the screen and logs with warnings is one tries to use it.
Modern cards, that can use the latest nvidia kernel drivers do not need the proprietary nvidia DDX driver and can use the modesetting driver instead. Only things that is missing, afaik, is sli support,
not sure about cuda if that needs any support.
I'm not familiar with amd, but afaik, things are similar there, and the vendor also recommends the modesetting driver.
With intel, everything should work with the modesetting driver, and the vendor marked the intel DDX driver as deprecated in favor of the modesetting driver.
@metux @callmetango @b-aaz @ONykyf @notbabaisyou @josephcrowell @X11Libre/dev Thoughts?
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