New DRM model

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt]

> EDID from user space turns out to be very simple. I just lifted Luca's I2C code
> out of radeonfb and loaded the I2C eeprom driver. Bingo, my EDID data is sittng
> there for userspace to see. It is also easy to tell what ports have monitors
> attached, they're the ones with EDID data.
> 
> It's a lot of work supporting non-EDID monitors. Are they common enough anymore
> to bother? I retired all of mine about four years ago.

Yes. They are, linux isn't only about supporting tomorrow hardware, then
there is embedded, then there is laptops without EDID lines, then
there is things like TV outputs, etc...

What I don't like in your whole discussion from the very beginning is
that you seem to focus on your specific idea & setup leaving everything
that doesn't fit in your scheme aside, which ends up beeing a fair bit.

I'm also not sure it's realist to remove any fb. access at this point...

> I slowly working through all of the places where Xfree touches the hardware. I
> haven't come to a conclusion on this yet -- whether to use IOCTLs or a daemon.
> I'm not too enthused about adding 100 IOCTLs if that's what it takes.

ioctl's are evil anyway. They should disappear. The normal flow of
commands should go through a read/write interface instead and the
format be done properly enough to avoid the 32/64 bits conversion,
which is one big issue with the current DRI on 64 bits platforms
with 32 bits userland.

Ben.