Fedora 37 Considering Removal Of Legacy X.Org Drivers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 37 Considering Removal Of Legacy X.Org Drivers

Adding to the interesting changes being worked on for Fedora 37 due out later this year is the removal of legacy X.Org drivers. Fedora is looking at removing the legacy graphics driver paths that are incompatible with running Wayland...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-37-Drop-Old-X11-Drivers

[Danny3]

Are Fedora developers the same as Gnome developers?

[Fuchs]

I assume "This change will identify the remaining configurations that can reach these drivers" will be done as throughout and carefully as they did with the efifb and other traditional framebuffer drivers in Fedora 36, where nvidia users are now left without working VTs. And then yell at nvidia for their own fault. At least other distributions discussing this do care more about their users than politics and wait until all drivers are ready for this change.

[RahulSundaram]

Are Fedora developers the same as Gnome developers?

Some of the Red Hat developers and volunteers involved in GNOME are also involved in Fedora, so there is some overlap (and that is true for majority of the core Linux components - Linux kernel, glibc, gcc etc) but it isn't the same throughout.

[birdie]

Another absolutely glorious asinine idea.

Your distro doesn't support your graphics card? Or graphics drivers crash/don't work with your GPU due to bugs? Well, boohoo, no graphical session for you at all. Oh, and no graphical installer for you as well.

Looks like enemies have infiltrated the Fedora community.

[SSJBurger]

Amazing idea, focusing on moving forward vs staying stuck in the past. I like it.

[RahulSundaram]

Another absolutely glorious asinine idea.

Your distro doesn't support your graphics card? Or graphics drivers crash/don't work with your GPU due to bugs? Well, boohoo, no graphical session for you at all. Oh, and no graphical installer for you as well.

Looks like enemies have infiltrated the Fedora community.

I would recommend reading the change proposal and the subsequent post here:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/arch...FBS3PAT45GKPY/

Tldr: Despite the inflammatory language here, developers who have worked on Xorg for over a decade are not enemies of the community. There is a fallback in place.

[Fuchs]

Tldr: Despite the inflammatory language here, developers who have worked on Xorg are not enemies of the community. There is a fallback in place.

We were also promised a fallback in https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Chang...ceFbdevDrivers, it doesn't work, and developers knew and know about it and simply do not care. Thus I understand that some people are afraid that a similar situation might arise with this change.

[birdie]

I would recommend reading the change proposal and the subsequent post here:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/arch...FBS3PAT45GKPY/

Tldr: Despite the inflammatory language here, developers who have worked on Xorg are not enemies of the community. There is a fallback in place.

Let me quote the entire message:

Note that for Fedora 36 we have already dropped efifb and replaced it with simpledrm: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Chang...ceFbdevDrivers

So this means that in our default configs we no longer have any fbdev drivers active.

And simpledrm can also be used with the kernels builtin vesa support on legacy BIOS systems, so in essence starting with F36 we will always have a drm/kms node available for the Xorg modesetting to bind to.

With the above Fedora *36* change in place the fbdev/vesa drivers will be practically completely unused, so I don't really expect any problems from this change.

As for odd hw out there, a lot of work has been the last couple of years to make sure that we have drm/kms drivers for almost all hw out there, esp. also focusing on weird server hw VGA cards.

So most hw will either be new enough to offer an efifb which simpledrm will turn into a drm/kms /dev/dri/card0 device. Or it will be old enough that it almost certainly will have a drm/kms driver.

And for the really odd duck out a vesa mode can be set on the kernel cmdline which simpledrm should then pick up:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/late...uide/svga.html
https://www.systutorials.com/configu...el-video-mode/

So I believe that this change is fine.

Regards,
Hans

"Can also be used" doesn't sound confident enough to me but if everything works with "simpledrm" I'm fine with that and sorry for being blatant. When compatibility is getting destroyed it just triggers me. Linux has always been about maximum compatibility and Fedora has already been on a downward spiral considering the deprecation of i686 support and upcoming "No BIOS boot support" for you.

What if I want to use Fedora 37 in a VM which doesn't support EFI? What if I want to test Fedora while minimizing its RAM consumption? Well, I no longer can.

A few years ago I tried to run Fedora on a PC with 64MB of RAM. It couldn't even boot into text mode as systemd crashed: "Not enough RAM".

[RahulSundaram]

We were also promised a fallback in https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Chang...ceFbdevDrivers, it doesn't work

The fallback does work for me, so I can't agree with that as a blanket statement, however from the earlier post, looks like you are referring to a specific driver. Can you link me to the associated bug report? I don't work on this or anything but I am just curious.