Resurrecting uvesafb and turning it into a kms driver ?

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

I've started a discussion on fedora-devel about what to do with old-style userspace mode setting
drivers when the suid root bit is removed from the X server binary:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-January/194123.html

I started this discussion there because to me the decision to actually remove the suid root bit,
and the implications of this wrt supported devices, etc. is mostly a distro decision. I assume
we as upstream will keep supporting the suid root + ums way of working for a long time yet.

One interesting remark made in the discussion thread I linked to is to simply drop support for
ums all together (in Fedora) and ship uvesafb ported to be a kms driver for cards which don't
have kms support yet.

I think this is an interesting approach, so this leads me to the question how crazy would it
be / how crazy a person would it take to do this. Specifically the resurrecting uvesafb and
turning it into a kms driver part ?

And related to this, assuming it is considered doable by a sufficiently motivated person,
would it be worthwhile ?

Regards,

Hans