Buildability of the Xorg drivers

[Alan Coopersmith]

On 2/2/22 12:27, Matt Turner wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 4:16 PM Alan Coopersmith
> <alan.coopersmith at oracle.com> wrote:
>> xf86-input-vmmouse
>> xf86-video-vmware
>>     - do not allow merge requests
> 
> This has been an issue before, in conjunction with not even knowing
> who the nominal maintainer was. E.g. someone submitted a patch almost
> a year ago https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2021-March/058688.html
> after asking on IRC how to make a merge request and being told...
> dunno, looks like you can't? Can we just turn on MRs for these
> projects?

That's a policy question at this point.  I thought MR's were turned on for
all the xorg modules after the migration except for drivers, and that for
drivers we left it up to the maintainers (if there were any) to decide.

I did turn on MR's for xf86-video-vbox as part of this work, since that driver
is now under community maintenance since the original author passed away, and
the Oracle Virtualbox team is supporting the new DRI/KMS based driver instead.
(This older driver was mostly published as a favor to Solaris, so we could keep
shipping an Xorg driver without having to port the kernel side to our kernel,
but could be used on other kernels as well.)

>> xf86-video-glint
>>     - Doesn't build due to the removal of ramdac drivers from Xorg:
>>       https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-glint/-/issues/1
>>
>> xf86-video-s3
>>     - Doesn't build due to the removal of ramdac drivers from Xorg, including
>>       "IBM.h" and "TI.h"
>>
>> xf86-video-tga
>>     - Doesn't build due to the removal of ramdac drivers from Xorg, including
>>       "BT.h"
> 
> Maybe we could make a libRAMDAC out of the removed files and these
> drivers could link against it. I'll give that a shot when I have time.

A library consumed by drivers is odd, but less odd than the xf86-video-v4l
module which I have to remember isn't really a normal driver when I see it.

I did also note that many of the video drivers still have code like:

         if (!xf86LoadSubModule(pScrn, "ramdac"))
                 return FALSE;

or

     if (pCg6->HWCursor && xf86LoadSubModule(pScrn, "ramdac") == NULL) {
         CG6FreeRec(pScrn);
         return FALSE;
     }

which is unnecessary since the ramdac module was changed from loadable to
builtin by commit ae75019c in 2007, for Xorg 1.4, though it won't break as
long as we don't remove "ramdac" from the compiled_in_modules list in
hw/xfree86/loader/loadmod.c.

-- 
         -Alan Coopersmith-                 alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
          Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris