Re: [git pull] drm

From: Jeff Garzik
Date: Fri Dec 11 2009 - 12:49:46 EST


On 12/11/2009 10:28 AM, Linus Torvalds wrote:


On Fri, 11 Dec 2009, Jeff Garzik wrote:

F11 uses nouveau here. It is actually a pain to get 'nv' going as an
alternate -- bugs have been filed. Makes kernel dev more difficult for me. I
was actually told, by Fedora people, that I should be hacking on the Fedora
(rpm-based) kernel, rather than a 100% upstream kernel like I have been
hacking/booting for the past decade, as a result of this setup (needing
nouveau kernel support, thus needing Fedora rather than upstream kernel).

Btw, for all my ranting (and maybe Alan is right, and I'm ranting at the
wrong people - it's just that the actual driver authors aren't the ones
that violated any rules), I do have to give kudos for the fact that the
F12 situation seems to be much better.

These days, what you can do is basically do all development (assuming it's
not nouveau development) in the upstream kernel, and then you just have a
separate 'nouveau' git tree (or branch) that you pull in the nouvea stuff
into.

That tree/branch will be a mess of random merges-of-the-day, but you'll
never push it out to anybody anyway, so nobody cares. And building that
messy merge tree will get you a working setup without any extra steps - a
simple "make modules_install ; make install" will JustWork(tm).

At the outset, I was hoping for an even more straightforward solution: "if nouveau kernel mod not present, fall back to nv" That would work without any kernel modifications at all.

But the answer came back as "if you run Fedora, run a Fedora kernel, otherwise don't expect anything to work" My experience directly contradicts claims of "upstream first" policy, both in code and attitude.

I am looking into doing the git tree merge you suggest right now.... I didn't know that was an option, given ongoing API changes. That would make my life quite a bit easier. As you note, anything graphics is _glacially_ slow due to vesa fallback, when using a 100% upstream kernel.

Jeff


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