Fedora 37 Considering Removal Of Legacy X.Org Drivers

[RahulSundaram]

"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

Concerns about compatibility issues or regressions on any changes like these are certainly valid. You seem knowledgeable enough that you could get involved early enough and test in Rawhide or the Fedora beta and submit feedback.

[Fuchs]

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.

nvidia does not support simpledrm yet, and removing efifb and other alternatives will result in a lack of VT when using the nvidia binary driver.
See also e.g. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...x/+bug/1965303

This is not news, and there are also bugs on fedora/redhat about it, e.g.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2071209

This is a known issue, yet fedora insists on it working and keeps the kernel config as is, whilst yelling at nvidia for their proprietary driver causing them work (no, it doesn't, other distributions manage fine, you can't blame nvidia for enforcing a configuration that they officially do not support yet, and then be surprised that it does not work)

If it works for you, I assume you either
1) use an older kernel (it works for me when I use 5.1* from fedora 35)
2) have a kernel config that isn't the default fedora one for their 5.17.* kernels
3) don't use the nvidia driver but rather nouveau (or simply not nvidia hardware)

[birdie]

Concerns about compatibility issues or regressions on any changes like these are certainly valid. You seem knowledgeable enough that you could get involved early enough and test in Rawhide or the Fedora beta and submit feedback.

Tell me what to test and I'll do. Hopefully with BIOS support as I still have devices without EFI.

[RahulSundaram]

Tell me what to test and I'll do. Hopefully with BIOS support as I still have devices without EFI.

I would post to fedora qa list and ask for guidance there, it's been a while since I was actively involved in qa efforts, so I wouldn't be able to give you exact steps without reading through the current docs.

[MorrisS.]

Is xorg still necessary?

[birdie]

Is xorg still necessary?

You're free not to run it.

[user1]

Is xorg still necessary?

If you don't mind losing the majority of Linux desktop users, then no.

[birdie]

If you don't mind losing the majority of Linux desktop users, then no.

The Linux elite are OK with that.

[RahulSundaram]

This is a known issue, yet fedora insists on it working and keeps the kernel config as is, whilst yelling at nvidia for their proprietary driver causing them work (no, it doesn't, other distributions manage fine, you can't blame nvidia for enforcing a configuration that they officially do not support yet, and then be surprised that it does not work)

Red Hat has a fairly collaborative relationship with Nvidia and have worked together on several projects involved with Fedora before. Here is a recent example:

https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2021/09/16/cool-happenings-in-fedora-workstation-land/

"One thing we spent a lot of effort on for a long time now is getting full support for the NVidia binary driver under Wayland. It has been a recurring topic in our bi-weekly calls with the NVidia engineering team ever since we started looking at moving to Wayland. There has been basic binary driver support for some time, meaning you could run a native Wayland session on top of the binary driver, but the critical missing piece was that you could not get support for accelerated graphics when running applications through XWayland, our X.org compatibility layer. Which basically meant that any application requiring 3D support and which wasn’t a native Wayland application yet wouldn’t work. So over the last Months we been having a great collaboration with NVidia around closing this gap, with them working closely with us in fixing issues in their driver while we have been fixing bugs and missing pieces in the rest of the stack. We been reporting and discussing issues back and forth allowing us a very quickly turnaround on issues as we find them which of course all resulted in the NVidia 470.42.01 driver with XWayland support."

So it isn't accurate to say that anyone is yelling or surprised. When a third party vendor gets a heads up on changes in a distribution, they can put it on their backlog but may not prioritize it without a major distribution with a release out first and then it becomes a chicken and egg issue. Sometimes driver issues affects a subset of hardware and Fedora developers have to make a tradeoff that involves a substantial reduction of the burden of legacy driver issues and free up limited resources to work on more forward facing projects or put off the change for later. Both has happened in the past with Fedora and Nvidia drivers over the years.

[grok]

Good, so you can try "efifb" or "simpledrm" in the xorg.conf.
This is needed for computers with a dead GPU, too. GPU fails or does graphic corruption, but still works with VESA, failsafe graphics : that's ok. You can even watch movies because the computers are that fast.

Is xorg still necessary?

Should people buy a Radeon 6500XT just so they can run a text editor? This is onerous.