Fedora 21 Will Try To Abandon Non-KMS GPU Drivers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 21 Will Try To Abandon Non-KMS GPU Drivers

There's hope that Fedora 21 will do away with non-KMS graphics drivers by default. A whole set of conventional (UMS) X.Org drivers are set to be retired in this first Fedora Linux release of 2014...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTQ0Njc

[FLHerne]

Can't say I like this - I was using r128 cards until earlier this year, so it seems likely that there are still users of them. i810 and Geode also seem a bit odd to me as hardware to abandon support for.

Neither the article or the linked mailpost seem to give any particular rationale for it. Is there some maintenance or performance advantage to having only KMS drivers beyond that of abandoning individual ones?

[Ericg]

Can't say I like this - I was using r128 cards until earlier this year, so it seems likely that there are still users of them. i810 and Geode also seem a bit odd to me as hardware to abandon support for.

Neither the article or the linked mailpost seem to give any particular rationale for it. Is there some maintenance or performance advantage to having only KMS drivers beyond that of abandoning individual ones?

There's not really any "maintenance" going in the Fedora camp. Ajax said that he basically only sees if it builds, and if it does, ship it. He also said that if anyone ELSE wants to maintain it, they are more than welcome to. But HE is done maintaining non-KMS drivers.

[garegin]

There's not really any "maintenance" going in the Fedora camp. Ajax said that he basically only sees if it builds, and if it does, ship it. He also said that if anyone ELSE wants to maintain it, they are more than welcome to. But HE is done maintaining non-KMS drivers.

why UMS for vesa? can they run off KMS too. im saying this because Wayland needs KMS.

[Ericg]

why UMS for vesa? can they run off KMS too. im saying this because Wayland needs KMS.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTI4NTU is what I think you're looking for, Garegin

[bridgman]

Neither the article or the linked mailpost seem to give any particular rationale for it. Is there some maintenance or performance advantage to having only KMS drivers beyond that of abandoning individual ones?

I don't think ajax is saying "kms is better, ums must die". Lack of maintainer is the actual problem -- there just happens to be a pretty good correlation between "not supporting kms" and "not having a maintainer" because the drivers with maintainers have mostly migrated to kms at this point.

IIRC Adam already confirmed that ums drivers with maintainers could stay in.

[chithanh]

The problem with these drivers is often that they stop building when major changes are made to the X server. Sometimes they remain broken for quite some time until a fix is applied, and even longer until a new release with the fix is made. It is quite understandable that there is a lack of time or motivation to hunt down patches or package git snapshots.

Who would suffer most from dropping the UMS drivers are laptop users with these chipsets, because the VESA driver may not be able to drive the laptop display at native resolution or support configuration of an external VGA output.

[Delgarde]

The problem with these drivers is often that they stop building when major changes are made to the X server. Sometimes they remain broken for quite some time until a fix is applied, and even longer until a new release with the fix is made. It is quite understandable that there is a lack of time or motivation to hunt down patches or package git snapshots.

So it's less a case of abandoning these drivers, and more an acknowledgement that they were abandoned years ago?

[Kivada]

So it's less a case of abandoning these drivers, and more an acknowledgement that they were abandoned years ago?

Yep. While it sucks, there is also nobody stepping up and porting these drivers to KMS either. The plan has basically been let the pre-OpenGL2 class hardware support die off since it's so old.

But there will always be distros that cater to the ancient hardware.

[dante]

Phoronix: Fedora 21 Will Try To Abandon Non-KMS GPU Drivers

There's hope that Fedora 21 will do away with non-KMS graphics drivers by default. A whole set of conventional (UMS) X.Org drivers are set to be retired in this first Fedora Linux release of 2014...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTQ0Njc

In few words , Fedora is trying to be buggy as possible