[Nouveau] Selecting supported chipsets in the driver?

[Ilia Mirkin]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 6:31 PM, Emil Velikov <emil.l.velikov at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 30/07/13 21:39, Christ-Jan Wijtmans wrote:
>> Hi, my apologies if this is the wrong place to post this.
>> I had the desire to turn on or off support for certain chipsets.
>> Because i felt like the nouveau drivers are (relatively) quite large and
>> depends on some kernel code that would only be used for certain chipsets.
>> I will take some time this week to see how this is coded and if its
>> possible but i just wanted a head sup opinion on you guys before i start
>> wasting my time.
>>
> I'm not entirely sure if you're talking about the kernel module, ddx
> (xf86-video-nouveau) or mesa.
>
> In either case, all three should be relatively easy to do, as normally
> the generation specific code is divided. Not too sure if it's worth the
> effort though
>
> * kernel module - 1.7 MiB, ~400KiB gzip
> * ddx - ~200KiB
> * mesa - 6.3 MiB (nouveau/gallium only)
>
> As you can see the sizes are not that big, and I'm not sure if the
> maintainers would be up-to the idea
>
> Not a maintainer myself so take the last statement if a healthy pinch of
> salt :)

I'm not a maintainer either, but to provide an opposing opinion, I
strongly support the notion of being able to select card generations
to build support for. 1.7M of kernel code is huge. I don't even think
it'd be that hard (at least for the kernel module and mesa, and I
think there's a lot less value in doing it for the DDX). I think it
might be as easy as some Makefile changes + a couple of ifdefs in the
init code to do Y/N selects. Making it so that the additional
functionality can be loaded on demand (i.e. Y/M/N) may be much
trickier, to the point of it not being worth it for the additional
complexity.

  -ilia