[PATCH] Remove XAA

[Dave Airlie]

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 10:47 PM, Matt Turner <mattst88 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 4:01 PM, Daniel Stone <daniel at fooishbar.org> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 22 January 2012 14:33, Mark Kettenis <mark.kettenis at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>>> No way!  XAA works for accelerated scrolling and makes a significant
>>> difference on slow CPUs.  It often works better for EXA.  If there is
>>> something that should be removed it's that since very few drivers actually
>>> have working EXA support.
>>
>> 'very few drivers' ... which cover about 99% of our userbase if you
>> just look at the big three.  But anyway, even if you don't think any
>> metric which gives equal weighting to xf86-video-intel as to
>> xf86-video-imstt is absolutely pointless, there are 12 drivers that we
>> ship ported to EXA.
>>
>>> Deliberately breaking drivers without giving people a chance to fix them
>>> isn't fair.  Because of the current development model of Xorg people may
>>> not notice that stuff is broken for more than six months.
>>
>> If you read the mail you're replying to, you'll note that I
>> specifically advocated holding off the merge so the drivers could be
>> fixed.  Although if no-one even notices for six months or more, I
>> think that tells you quite a lot about the state of the driver, its
>> maintenance, and its usage.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Daniel
>
> I like killing code, but I don't understand how killing the XAA code
> helps us (other than killing code).

Oh it helps me a lot, when you are trying to rework the X server ABI
to be hotplug capable, the less useless ancient untestable pieces of
crap you have to port makes the chance of users with modern hardware
getting a modern feature everyone expects us to have had 10 years ago
increases.

> Clearly they're not very important, but some hardware can't do EXA.
> I'm not going to claim there are defensible reasons for using these
> cards -- except perhaps in the cases of hardware like newport and the
> SGI O2.

But what do you run on these systems? maybe we need a mini-EXA that
only accelerates upload to the front buffer, like shadowfb but is also
DRI1 compatible. All XAA is doing for you is fast X core protocol
operations on the front buffer, its not accelerating anything the
current DE or apps use.

Dave.
>
> Matt
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