[RFC 00/16] drm/nouveau: initial support for GK20A (Tegra K1)

[David Herrmann]

Hi

[..snip..]
> Finally, support for probing GK20A is added in the last 2 patches. It should be
> noted that contrary to what Nouveau currently expects, GK20A does not embed any
> display hardware (that part being handled by tegradrm). So this driver should
> really be only used through DRM render-nodes and collaborate with the display
> driver using PRIME. I have not yet figured out how to turn GK20A's instantiation
> of Nouveau into a render-node only driver without breaking support for existing
> desktop GPUs, and consequently the driver spawns a /dev/dri/cardX node which we
> should try to get rid of.

You cannot get rid of cardX currently. It is implied by DRIVER_MODESET
and that flag should actually be called NOT_A_LEGACY_DRIVER. So you
cannot remove it. I did try to replace DRIVER_MODESET by an inverted
DRIVER_LEGACY flag some time ago, but I thought it's not worth it.

Anyhow, you can easily add a new flag to make
drm_dev_register()/drm_dev_alloc() not create the drm_minor for
DRM_MINOR_LEGACY, which would prevent the card0 node from showing up.
But people started using the cardX interface as base interface so mesa
might not be able to open render-nodes if the related card-node is not
available (which is a bug in their code, so no reason to support that
by not adding stand-alone render-nodes).

Long story short: If you want to do it properly, just add a flag to
DRM core that prevents DRM_MINOR_LEGACY from showing up. If you just
want it to work, simply keep a dummy card0.

Thanks
David