Re: New proposed DRM interface design

Keith Whitwell
2004-09-04T10:57:48Z

Nick Piggin wrote:
> Keith Whitwell wrote:
>
>> Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>>
>>> On Sat, Sep 04, 2004 at 11:23:35AM +0100, Keith Whitwell wrote:
>>>
>>>>> Actually regulat users do. And they do by pulling an uptodate
>>>>> kernel or
>>>>> using a vendor kernel with backports. This model would work for
>>>>> video drivers
>>>>> aswell.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Sure, explain to me how I should upgrade my RH-9 system to work on
>>>> my new i915?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Download a new kernel.org kernel or petition the fedora legacy folks to
>>> include a drm update. The last release RH-9 kernel has various security
>>> and data integrity issues anyway, so you'd be a fool to keep running it.
>>
>>
>>
>> OK, I've found www.kernel.org, and clicked on the 'latest stable
>> kernel' link. I got a file called "patch-2.6.8.1.bz2". I tried to
>> install this but nothing happened. My i915 still doesn't work. What
>> do I do now?
>>
>
> Just out of interest, what would the scenario be if you do if you could
> get a compatible driver?

Nick, I'm sorry I couldn't quite parse your question.

Ideally, everybody would have all the drivers they need right there on the
media they got their distribution on, and if not, they'd be able to pull them
over quick smart from their vendor online.

The biggest problem the DRI had in the early years was believing that you
could get a new driver released to the public though the DRI tree, then an
XFree86 CVS merge and XFree86 release, a Linux kernel release, maybe making it
into vendor updates for X and kernel, but more likely the next full RedHat
release, and ultimately into users hands in a reasonable amount of time.
Typically it was 6 months to a year for this process to roll through.

Given that we seldom had access to pre-release hardware, that meant that users
were getting drivers about the time that cards became obsolete.

A couple of things have changed since then - DRI drivers for the i915 were
available at launch of the hardware, not 6 months later. But the rest of the
process is still pretty slow, which is why the DRI snapshots and downloadable
binaries were a significant step forward - if nvidia in particular can get
uptodate drivers quickly into the hands of unsophisticated users, you have to
ask yourself why users of DRI hardware should be forced to wait 6 months and
then jump through hoops just to get their video cards working.

Keith