Re: [git pull] drm

Jeff Garzik
2009-12-11T17:49:36Z

On 12/11/2009 10:28 AM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, 11 Dec 2009, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>>
>> F11 uses nouveau here. It is actually a pain to get 'nv' going as an
>> alternate -- bugs have been filed. Makes kernel dev more difficult for me. I
>> was actually told, by Fedora people, that I should be hacking on the Fedora
>> (rpm-based) kernel, rather than a 100% upstream kernel like I have been
>> hacking/booting for the past decade, as a result of this setup (needing
>> nouveau kernel support, thus needing Fedora rather than upstream kernel).
>
> Btw, for all my ranting (and maybe Alan is right, and I'm ranting at the
> wrong people - it's just that the actual driver authors aren't the ones
> that violated any rules), I do have to give kudos for the fact that the
> F12 situation seems to be much better.
>
> These days, what you can do is basically do all development (assuming it's
> not nouveau development) in the upstream kernel, and then you just have a
> separate 'nouveau' git tree (or branch) that you pull in the nouvea stuff
> into.
>
> That tree/branch will be a mess of random merges-of-the-day, but you'll
> never push it out to anybody anyway, so nobody cares. And building that
> messy merge tree will get you a working setup without any extra steps - a
> simple "make modules_install ; make install" will JustWork(tm).

At the outset, I was hoping for an even more straightforward solution:
"if nouveau kernel mod not present, fall back to nv" That would work
without any kernel modifications at all.

But the answer came back as "if you run Fedora, run a Fedora kernel,
otherwise don't expect anything to work" My experience directly
contradicts claims of "upstream first" policy, both in code and attitude.

I am looking into doing the git tree merge you suggest right now.... I
didn't know that was an option, given ongoing API changes. That would
make my life quite a bit easier. As you note, anything graphics is
_glacially_ slow due to vesa fallback, when using a 100% upstream kernel.

Jeff