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

[Glen Gray]

On 19 Jan 2012, at 17:25, Daniel Vetter wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 05:22:56PM +0000, Glen Gray wrote:
>> 
>> 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.  -- 
> 
> These discussions are about the i81x, _not_ any later gen2 device. Afaics
> I'm about the only serious user of that stuff left, at least concering the
> use of the latest and greatest upstream code ...

Understood, I just parsed it to read i8xx. 
-- 
Glen Gray
<slaine at slaine.org>