Re: patch for video.c driver

[Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 10:08:12AM +0800, Zhang Rui wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-03-12 at 23:47 +0800, Terence Ripperda wrote:
> >  The intent was to follow the same architecture that the
> > video.ko driver already follows and to make the support generic enough for
> > many different users. For example, above I mentioned that both NVIDIA and
> > other vendors have ACPI extension methods, the support we're adding would be
> > usable by all such vendors.
> 
> Makes sense, although the other vendors usually offers a platform
> specific device rather than a platform specific control method.

Mm. I don't see any reason for video output switching to be handled in 
kernel. It's fundamentally behaviour that depends on the user's 
preferences, so the logical way to handle this is for the event to be 
sent to userland (as it is currently) and for a userspace agent to then 
turn this into an xrandr event. The only thing that currently prevents 
this from working with the binary nvidia drivers is the fact that they 
don't appear to support xrandr for output control. I'd prefer it if we 
didn't work around X driver shortcomings by adding interfaces to the 
kernel.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org