[Nouveau] Dropping compat from master-compat

Pekka Paalanen pq at iki.fi
Wed Sep 9 10:51:36 PDT 2009


Hi,

the master-compat branch in nouveau/linux-2.6 kernel tree has got a
little bit out of hand. Distributions are packaging that, and I
cannot know if they warn their users well enough about the hazards
of using backported DRM (see:
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/UpstreamKernelIssues ).

I originally intended master-compat as an easy way of installing
the Nouveau flavour of DRM modules even on older kernels, because
I felt I should share my helper scripts and patches. However, I
never intended to do real kernel bug tracking, that was the users'
responsiblity. I didn't bring that fact forward well enough and
I'm sorry about that. Now I know why no-one else has done this
for any of the other drivers. It's drm.git all over again.

Also, running the Nouveau DRM with an older kernel is of questionable
value when it comes to testing. Why support something you do not
really support?

Therefore, I will drop compatibility code from master-compat branch,
and I will add a compile time check for the kernel version. The
master-compat branch will be just like the master branch, except it
contains the out-of-tree build scripts. This will force users to
follow very closely the official RC and release kernels.

If you want to use the latest Nouveau DRM with an older kernel,
you get to do the backporting and kernel bug tracking yourself.
This is the distributions' responsibility in general.

Couple of things to remember:
- there still are no releases of any Nouveau code
- the recommended way to build Nouveau DRM is to build the
whole kernel from the same tree.

Sorry for the trouble, but we need to look forward.

-- 
Pekka Paalanen
http://www.iki.fi/pq/


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