From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt Date: Thu, 08 Dec 2016 01:01:19 +0000 Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] staging: remove fbdev drivers Message-Id: <1481158879.26959.41.camel@kernel.crashing.org> List-Id: References: <1479888193-23908-1-git-send-email-tomi.valkeinen@ti.com> In-Reply-To: <1479888193-23908-1-git-send-email-tomi.valkeinen@ti.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: Tomi Valkeinen , linux-fbdev@vger.kernel.org, dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org, Greg Kroah-Hartman , Thomas Petazzoni , Noralf =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Tr=F8nnes?= , Sudip Mukherjee , Teddy Wang , Arnaud Patard Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Wed, 2016-11-23 at 10:03 +0200, Tomi Valkeinen wrote: > Hi, > > Since the fbdev framework is in maintenance mode and all new display drivers > should be made with the DRM framework, remove the fbdev drivers from staging. > > Note: the patches are created with git format-patch -D, so they can't be > applied. Only for review. I missed the discussion where this decision was made, I admit I am unimpressed by it. DRM drivers don't strike me as suitable for small/slow cores with dumb framebuffers or simple 2D only accel, such as the one found in the ASpeed BMCs. With drmfb you basically have to shadow everything into memory & copy over everything, and locks you out of simple 2D accel. For a simple text console the result is orders of magnitude slower and memory hungry than a simple fbdev. At least that was the case last I looked at the DRM stuff with Dave, maybe things have changed... Not everything has a powerful 3D GPU. Ben.