[Intel-gfx] [PATCH] Make XAA support optional

[Glen Gray]

On 18 Jan 2012, at 12:41, Daniel Vetter wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 12:27:49PM +0000, Chris Wilson wrote:
>> On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:04:43 +0100, Daniel Vetter <daniel at ffwll.ch> wrote:
>>> On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 10:37:24AM +0000, Chris Wilson wrote:
>>>> On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:45:51 +1100, Daniel Stone <daniel at fooishbar.org> wrote:
>>>>> Does what it says on the box.
>>>> 
>>>> Danvet can you please test this on your elderly i810 box and make sure
>>>> we don't accidentally open the can of worms. Any sign of regressions?
>>> 
>>> Why don't we just rip it out entirely? If a bored soul ever ports this
>>> driver to kms we likely just need to reimplement proper accel with sna, so
>>> I don't think there's much value.
>> 
>> If we did rip it out, what happens? The X server uses the vesa driver,
>> which is equivalent to i810 for modesetting, no 3d support, no overlays,
>> and no accelerated blits (which is dying anyway). Am I right in thinking
>> that after removal of XAA, the legacy i810 offers no more functionality
>> or performance than is available through VESA?
> 
> Afaict we're still have left
> - dri1 for glxgears
> - Xv for video, even XvMC might still work
> - modesettting, the driver only uses vesa to grab the edid, but does all
>  the modesetting with direct vga register banging. Yep, I'm running my
>  i815 on a 1920x1080 screen, pretty sure that mode isn't in the vesa
>  bios.

Being responsible for thousands of boxes with i855 chips, deployed across the world, I'm nervous about these discussions. We typically run at resolutions of 1360x768 and use XVideo for IPTV playback. Admittedly these devices will be EOL at some point, but the longer I can keep them updated software wise the happier I'll be.

On my todo list is to test the latest and greatest releases with sna enabled on those devices. 
-- 
Glen Gray
<slaine at slaine.org>