[Intel-gfx] [PATCH 0/3] fbdev no more!

[Andy Lutomirski]

On 06/16/2013 07:57 AM, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> So I've taken a look again at the locking mess in our fbdev support and cried.
> Fixing up the console_lock mess around the fbdev notifier will be real work,
> semanatically the fbdev layer does lots of stupid things (like the radeon resume
> issue I've just debugged) and the panic notifier is pretty much a lost cause.
> 
> So I've decided to instead rip it all out. It seems to work \o/

I wonder how badly this breaks on EFI systems.  Currently, efifb is an
fbdev driver.  When i915 calls register_framebuffer, the fbdev core
removes efifb's framebuffer.  (This is scary already -- what if i915 has
reused that memory for something else beforehand?)  But now, if i915
doesn't call register_framebuffer, the efifb "framebuffer" might stick
around forever.

Presumably, efifb ought to become a framebuffer-only drm driver and
there should be a saner way to hand control from efifb (or vesa?) to a
real driver.

--Andy