Xorg 7.4 release plan

[pcpa at mandriva.com.br]

Quoting Ian Romanick <idr at us.ibm.com>:

> Paulo Cesar Pereira de Andrade wrote:
> | Adam Jackson wrote:
> |> pciaccess is not done.  We still have ~20 drivers that haven't been
> |> ported, and some of them are not quite trivial to convert.  This needs a
> |> champion in a serious way.  I'm convinced enough of pciaccess' value
> |> that I don't intend to revert it for 7.4, but we need to make progress
> |> here.
> |   Until all drivers are either ported, or dropped, at least an interface
> | that converts old functions calls to pciaccess format should be made.
> |   Last time I looked at the code, there was initial work on it, and since
> | drivers that have support call xf86AddDriver with "HasDriverFuncs"
> argument,
> | instead of 0, it should be possible to adapt at run time.
>
> This has been discussed before.  It is my belief that it would about as
> much work to create such a layer as it would be to just port the drivers.

  I agree it should require signficant work but I suspect it could be
done without all the hardware to test (and have the benefit of backwards
compatibility as well as suport those binary only drivers).
  I started doing convertion on some modules to try to understand better
it. Most of it isn't hard, but in several cases, without hardware to
actually test the changes, and my limited knowledge of the involved code,
I ended giving up on it.

> |   I am concerned more about if also because I need to work with VIA
> | and SIS hardware and binary only modules for OEMs; and long delay from
> | the vendors to adapt to changes.
>
> That is an unfortunate side effect of those OEMs choosing to be
> closed-source.  If they care about their customers, they'll update their
> code quickly.  If they don't care about their customers...well, maybe
> that's a sign of something.

  Unfortunately, at least for most OEMs we are doing, Linux is choosen
only for the cheapest implementations, with the cheapest hardware (yes,
that is fun).
  I believe there should exist more involvement from VIA and SiS with
Xorg, as the drivers in the Xorg tree are almost obsolete and/or only
address hardware almost 5 years old.

Paulo