On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 11:11 AM, Florian Tobias Schandinat FlorianSchandinat@gmx.de wrote:
On 09/17/2011 03:16 PM, Rob Clark wrote:
From userspace perspective, fbdev doesn't go away. It is just a
legacy interface provided on top of DRM/KMS driver mostly via helper functions. With this approach, you get the richer KMS API (and all the related plumbing for hotplug, EDID parsing, multi-head support, flipping, etc) for userspace stuff that needs that, but can keep the fbdev userspace interface for legacy apps. It is the best of both worlds. There isn't really any good reason to propagate standalone fbdev driver anymore.
I disagree. This depends on the functionality the hardware has, the desired userspace and the manpower one has to do it. And of course if you just want fb having fb via DRM/KMS has some overhead/bloat. It's perfectly okay to have just an fb driver for devices that can't do more anyway. And fb is no legacy interface but actively developed, just with other goals than DRM/KMS is, it aims for stability and to provide a direct interface, not needing any X or wayland crap.
Hmm, for simple enough devices, maybe fb is fine.. but if you are covering a range of devices which include stuff with more sophisticated userspace (X/wayland), then just doing DRM/KMS and using the DRM fbdev helpers, vs doing both DRM/KMS and standalone fbdev.. well that seems like a no-brainer.
I still think, if you are starting a new driver, you should just go ahead and use DRM/KMS.. a simple DRM/KMS driver that doesn't support all the features is not so complex, and going this route future-proofs you better when future generations of hardware gain more capabilities and sw gain more requirements.
BR, -R
Best regards,
Florian Tobias Schandinat _______________________________________________ dri-devel mailing list dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel