[Intel-gfx] [PATCH RESEND 2/2] drm/i915: prevent the vgacon from ever reloading

[Ilia Mirkin]

On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 10:40 AM, Emil Velikov <emil.l.velikov at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 27 November 2015 at 15:10, Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter at ffwll.ch> wrote:
>> It only leads to bloodshed and tears - we don't bother to restore a
>> working legacy vga hw setup.
>>
>> On haswell with the new dynamic power well code this leads to even
>> more hilarity since for some configurations the hardware is simply no
>> longer there.
>>
>> The actual implementation is a bit a hack - we realy on fbcon to kick
>> out the vgacon. To make this also work with I915_FBDEV=n (or FBCON=n)
>> and VGA_CONSOLE=y i915 already unregisters the vga console manually
>> early in the driver load sequence.
>>
> Interesting... nv50 and later GPUs are in a roughly similar shame
> afaict. They lack the dedicated hardware and no one really bothered
> figuring out how to restore things to a working shape [1].
>
> Then again, upon sequential load of the nouveau module the GPU gets
> initialised properly, where you can get X (weston?) up and running
> without issues. Am I thinking about a different thing ?
>
> I take it that you guys do less of the (re)initialisation dance, to
> ensure faster boot times ?
>
> Thanks,
> Emil
>
> [1] http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/KernelModeSetting/#deactivatingkmsandunloadingnouveau

FWIW it's possible to unload nouveau, at which point your screen turns
off (because we can't restore the vga emulation junk... haven't the
faintest clue how it works), and then reload it, at which point fbcon
gets rebound and is completely happy. I can't tell what this patch is
doing, but for your own sanity, you should support unloading/reloading
i915 as well.

  -ilia