modular: Changes to 'master'

olafBuddenhagen at gmx.net olafBuddenhagen at gmx.net
Fri Oct 24 01:45:34 PDT 2008


Hi,

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 09:51:45AM -0700, Keith Packard wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-10-21 at 18:15 +0200, Luc Verhaegen wrote:

> > Is there a single technical reason why shipping both is a problem?
> 
> For the same reason the kernel avoids shipping multiple drivers for
> the same hardware -- we want a unique PCI-ID -> driver mapping so that
> all X.org downstream users share the same code base for their
> hardware.
> 
> Forking driver development is a great way to explore new ideas and
> demonstrate new technologies, but in the long-term, we really want the
> best ideas to be integrated into a single driver for each device.

Well, there might be some merit in only having a single driver for each
piece of hardware (though I'm not entirely convinced of that) -- but on
what grounds do you decide which one gets the preference? Dropping
radeonhd looks like a totally arbitrary decision to me. After all,
radeonhd has been added before radeon gained newer chipset support, and
I really fail to see why radeon-now-with-r500+ should be treated as the
official driver, and radeonhd as some alien...

-antrik-



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