Direct hardware bashing modules (int10 et al) and recent hardware

[Adam Jackson]

On Thu, 2015-11-19 at 12:07 +0000, Emil Velikov wrote:

> It seems that most of the use-cases are related to the int10 module.
> To make things even more interesting - when using the Sun/Oracle
> compiler many additional functions will end up exported relative to
> gcc built xserver.

That should be fixed, the export list shouldn't vary by compiler.

> Afaik the int10 module is not used by kms based video drivers, yet I
> cannot speak about the "legacy" or proprietary ones. I'm curious how
> people feel about it - do we still have real users for it, would
> people feel sad to see it go, etc.

You need it for vesa, for posting secondary cards outside of KMS
setups, and for posting cards at all if they have x86 firmware and
you're not on an x86 CPU.

If the next question is "can't we stop supporting vesa" the answer is
"I wish".

> While on the topic a few other modules come to mind - vgahw. vbe,

vesa needs vbe (though vbe and int10 could reasonably be merged into a
single library).  Most of the non-KMS drivers for PCI hardware use
vgahw one way or another.

> fbdevhw, ramdac and extensions - dga, tslib. How people feel about
> those ?

Removing fbdevhw would break mga and r128 and a few others on non-x86.

ramdac is... special.  It would be nice to see the ramdac drivers split
out to the GPU drivers consuming them, but the rest of it is hardware
cursor support that ought to remain shared in server.  It'd be nice if
we didn't have two files named xf86Cursor.c though.

DGA's pretty harmless at this point, and if you remove the extension
entirely you break a bunch of old games that require it to be there.

The tslib question is really what do we do with kdrive.  Xfake seems
pretty useless given Xvfb, and the only win for Xfbdev over Xorg+fbdev
is marginally smaller footprint.  On the other hand Xephyr is a hugely
important tool, but tslib support in Xephyr doesn't make a lot of
sense.  Personally I'd like to see the first two removed and tslib
support dropped.

- ajax