No more new fbdev drivers, please

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Hello,

On Thu, 24 Sep 2015 15:27:01 +0300, Tomi Valkeinen wrote:

> fbdev is (more or less) maintained, but it's a deprecated framework. All
> new Linux display drivers should be done on DRM.
> 
> So let's not add any more new fbdev drivers.
> 
> I will continue to maintain the current fbdev drivers, and I don't mind
> adding some new features to those current drivers, as long as the amount
> of code required to add the features stays sensible.
> 
> I see we have three fbdev drivers in staging: xgifb, fbtft and sm750fb,
> and the question is what to do with those.
> 
> xgifb was added in 2010, and is still in staging.
> 
> fbtft looks like maybe some kind of framework on top of fbdev, with
> fbtft specific subdrivers... I didn't look at it in detail, but my gut
> says "never".

fbtft mainly drives some very simple I2C-based or SPI-based displays,
and DRM is I believe overkill for such displays. Last time I talked
with Laurent Pinchart about such drivers, I believe he said that such
simple drivers could probably continue to use the fbdev subsystem.

Or are there some plans to make the writing of DRM drivers for very
simple/trivial devices a bit simpler?

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com