Re: Process to merge Openchrome work

[Daniel Vetter <daniel@ffwll.ch>]

On Mon, Apr 02, 2012 at 04:23:57PM +0100, James Simmons wrote:
> 
> Hello!!
> 
> 	This last year the Openchrome support for the VIA chipsets has 
> come along way from being in a state of decay. The plan is to release
> a Xorg driver June 1 that will have support for the KMS as well as UMS.
> The goal is to have this xorg driver out in the wild before the kernel
> side is ready so that the migration to the new kernel drivers will be
> as painless as possible. My hope is to merge the kernel tree for public 
> use for Christmas.
> 	This brings up the question I had with the other project leader.
> How does one go about merging the tree? What makes this more complex is
> that a old via drm kernel driver already exist. Do we just drop in the 
> code into the staging area? Does it have to be piece meal? Does a rename 
> of the driver need to happen? What would you recommend ?

Suggestion from a drm/i915 hacker: Make a clean split between the old ums
driver and the new kms/gem/ttm thing. Not being able to quickly switch
between the 2 drivers makes debugging a bit more involved until the kms
stuff all works well, but with a everything-smashed-into-one driver you'll
sign up for a decent long-term burden. After all, you're never allowed to
ditch the old ums/dri1 stuff.

For merging I suggest to go through staging - practically no work required
for that than to send a big patch to greg kh.

Yours, Daniel
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Mail: daniel@ffwll.ch
Mobile: +41 (0)79 365 57 48