[PATCH] drm: deprecate driver date

[Jani Nikula]

On Tue, 30 Apr 2024, Simon Ser <contact at emersion.fr> wrote:
> On Monday, April 29th, 2024 at 18:43, Jani Nikula <jani.nikula at intel.com> wrote:
>
>> The driver date serves no useful purpose, because it's hardly ever
>> updated. The information is misleading at best.
>> 
>> As described in Documentation/gpu/drm-internals.rst:
>> 
>> The driver date, formatted as YYYYMMDD, is meant to identify the date
>> of the latest modification to the driver. However, as most drivers
>> fail to update it, its value is mostly useless. The DRM core prints it
>> to the kernel log at initialization time and passes it to userspace
>> through the DRM_IOCTL_VERSION ioctl.
>> 
>> Stop printing the driver date at init, and start returning the empty
>> string "" as driver date through the DRM_IOCTL_VERSION ioctl.
>
> Sounds good to me.
>
> Acked-by: Simon Ser <contact at emersion.fr>

Thanks!

> BTW, I wonder if the driver version number (major/minor/patch) is useful?
> Do drivers update it?

I think most things these days should depend on capabilities rather than
versions.

i915 is at 1.6.0 and the last change was commit 2228ed67223f ("drm: i915
updates"). 18 years ago. From that perspective, I'd be happy to drop
them too.

However, amdgpu is at 3.57.0, with an elaborate changelog in
amdgpu_drv.c, and the last change was commit 91963397c49a ("drm/amdgpu:
Enable tunneling on high-priority compute queues"). Less than six months
ago.

I wonder if we could stop initializing and printing the version for
drivers that don't care, and leave it for drivers that do? Obviously
feels more risky than the date.

BR,
Jani.


-- 
Jani Nikula, Intel