[PATCH 2/2] drm: make DRI1 drivers depend on BROKEN

[Connor Behan]

On 25/08/16 11:13 AM, Alex Deucher wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 25, 2016 at 11:04 AM, Emil Velikov
> <emil.l.velikov at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 25 August 2016 at 12:14, Daniel Vetter <daniel at ffwll.ch> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Aug 04, 2016 at 09:15:07AM +0100, Chris Wilson wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Aug 04, 2016 at 10:06:57AM +0200, David Herrmann wrote:
>>>>> The legacy DRI1 drivers expose highly broken interfaces to user-space. No
>>>>> modern system should enable them, or you will effectively allow user-space
>>>>> to circumvent most of your kernel security measures. The DRI1 kernel APIs
>>>>> are simply broken.
>>>>>
>>>>> User-space can always use vesafb/efifb/simplefb and friends to get working
>>>>> graphics.
>>>>>
>>>>> Lets hide the old drivers behind CONFIG_BROKEN. In case they turn out to
>>>>> be still used (really?), we can easily revert this and figure out a way to
>>>>> move them out of sight (e.g., moving all DRI1 drivers to
>>>>> drivers/gpu/dri1/).
>>>>>
>>>>> Signed-off-by: David Herrmann <dh.herrmann at gmail.com>
>>>> Acked-by: Chris Wilson <chris at chris-wilson.co.uk>
>>>>
>>>> I'd rather have a couple of distro devs check if they are still using
>>>> any of these, and would value their a-b/r-b.
>>> Mesa stopped shipping dri1 drivers years ago, and neither Fedora and
>>> Debian here have that old version packaged (it should keep working since
>>> the dri loader is an ABI). I don't think anyone needs this, and if I'm
>>> wrong we'll hear about it ;-)
>>>
>> Archlinux (which seems to be picking more users) is still shipping
>> dri1 drivers - both mesa and X. No idea for many actually use those
>> and/or for how much longer the packages will be around.
>>
>> IIRC the maintainer, Connor, used to hack on the xf86-video-r128 with
>> plans(?) on getting things KMS aware. Not sure if that was by
>> extending the existing radeon kernel, ddx, mesa driver(s) or
>> otherwise.
>> Connor, can you shed some light ?
>>
> r128 is 90% the same as early radeons so it would make sense to add
> support to radeon.
>
> Alex

Ccing Kevin Brace.

The drivers were removed from mesa and "you won't have to freeze your
kernel or anything" was one of the justifications given at the time for
why this wasn't a bad idea. So yes, I have dri1 packages in the
Archlinux repos with no plans to drop them. The people who have emailed
me about them and filed bugs are probably much less than 1% of the user
base but I've never considered that relevant. The point is that
hobbyists who want to use old hardware or play with seldomly updated
drivers should be able to do this without too many additional hurdles.

AFAIK the drivers still work as well as they did in the late 90s. And
it's easy for security conscious people to not modprobe them. My -1
would probably mean more if I were still following my initial plans of
adding r128 support to the radeon kernel module but at some point while
reading documentation I lost motivation. Hopefully this is temporary.


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