[PATCH] fbdev: Remove udlfb driver

[Mikulas Patocka]

On Mon, 30 Nov 2020, Thomas Zimmermann wrote:

> Udlfb has been superseded by DRM's udl. The DRM driver is better by
> any means and actively maintained. Remove udlfb.

Hi

I am using udlfb and it's definitely better than the DRM driver. The DRM 
driver will crash the kernel if you unplug the device while Xorg is 
running. The framebuffer driver doesn't crash in this case. (I have a cat 
and the cat sometimes unplugs cables and I don't want to reboot the system 
because of it :-)

The framebuffer driver is faster, it keeps back buffer and updates only 
data that differ between the front and back buffer. The DRM driver doesn't 
have such optimization, it will update everything in a given rectangle - 
this increases USB traffic and makes video playback more jerky.

The framebuffer driver supports programs running full-screen directly on 
the framebuffer console, such as web browser "links -g", image viewer 
"fbi", postscript+pdf viewer "fbgs", ZX Spectrum emulator "fuse-sdl", 
movie player "mplayer -vo fbdev". The DRM driver doesn't run them.

If you seach for someone to maintain the framebuffer driver, I can do it.

Mikulas


> Signed-off-by: Thomas Zimmermann <tzimmermann at suse.de>
> ---
>  CREDITS                      |    5 +
>  Documentation/fb/index.rst   |    1 -
>  Documentation/fb/udlfb.rst   |  162 ---
>  MAINTAINERS                  |    9 -
>  drivers/video/fbdev/Kconfig  |   17 +-
>  drivers/video/fbdev/Makefile |    1 -
>  drivers/video/fbdev/udlfb.c  | 1994 ----------------------------------
>  7 files changed, 6 insertions(+), 2183 deletions(-)
>  delete mode 100644 Documentation/fb/udlfb.rst
>  delete mode 100644 drivers/video/fbdev/udlfb.c