Re: Fall back drivers?
On Sat, 31 Jan 2004, Jerry Haltom wrote: I've been thinking about how to make X more userfriendly. Driver nvidia,vesa Is a line like this possible, or could it be a good suggestion to implement? It would allow fallback from one driver to another in case the first doesn't function. One of the main complaints I've been hearing from various people I'm working with is how X doens't Just Work. In that you can plug it in, and see a screen. Certainly most of this is up to the fault of the packager, but some of it is because they'res some things the packager would need to work around that are difficult, such as detecting that X failed to launch, so switching it to vesa mode and trying again. Generally, either a driver works or doesn't work. For cases of doesn't work, the server either dies and you're dropped back to the prompt if you're lucky, or you might have corrupted video which is not restoreable, and you're dumped back to the prompt and can't see what you're typing, or, your entire machine is hard locked and you have to hit the reset button. The other doesn't work scenario, is that the X server does start ok, the video driver has screen corruption of some kind, and the server has no idea that something is wrong. In this case, there's no way for the server to ever be able to know what's wrong. For cases of works, well... it works. The problem is that there's either: 1) no way to autodetect most if not all of the various failure cases I outlined above. or 2) If you could autodetect a failure case, in most cases the video is hosed and requires a hardware reset anyway, which requires a reboot. or 3) The hardware is totally locked, and not recoverable. There's not very many cases I can think of in which the X server could start up with one video driver, detect some failure mode, and fallback to the vesa or other driver easily. There are a few scenarios, however the number of useful cases this would allow the server to start for, compared to the end user confusion that might result, would make it not worth it IMHO. My personal opinion, is that the rest of the OS should provide a mechanism for detecting the cases where the X server dies immediately, such as a SEGV, and then tries to start a minimal preconfigured safe mode of sorts. This could be done using a driver based-upon the vesa driver. Something akin to Microsoft's VGASAVE driver used in Windows' safe-mode. Just a thought. -- Mike A. Harris ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Fall back drivers?
I've been thinking about how to make X more userfriendly. Driver nvidia,vesa Is a line like this possible, or could it be a good suggestion to implement? It would allow fallback from one driver to another in case the first doesn't function. One of the main complaints I've been hearing from various people I'm working with is how X doens't Just Work. In that you can plug it in, and see a screen. Certainly most of this is up to the fault of the packager, but some of it is because they'res some things the packager would need to work around that are difficult, such as detecting that X failed to launch, so switching it to vesa mode and trying again. -- Jerry Haltom [EMAIL PROTECTED] Feedback Plus, Inc. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: Fall back drivers?
Ahh! I hadn't checked any of the work in 4.4 before I came up with this idea. This is wonderful. What about in the case of a broken driver where the X server is unable to start? One of the main problems I've seen Is when somebody breaks their X config, either by running some driver installation (nvidia-installer yay!) or recompiling their kernel and leaving off a third party module results in a non working X. Users would definitely would rather be at a 640x480 display running in 16 colors than a login console prompt. Or at least this is my assumption: power users are more than welcome to do whatever they want. On Sat, 2004-01-31 at 14:06, David Dawes wrote: On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 01:41:45PM -0600, Jerry Haltom wrote: I've been thinking about how to make X more userfriendly. Driver nvidia,vesa Is a line like this possible, or could it be a good suggestion to implement? It would allow fallback from one driver to another in case the first doesn't function. One of the main complaints I've been hearing from various people I'm working with is how X doens't Just Work. In that you can plug it in, and see a screen. Certainly most of this is up to the fault of the packager, but some of it is because they'res some things the packager would need to work around that are difficult, such as detecting that X failed to launch, so switching it to vesa mode and trying again. The automatic configuration support (that is, the ability to use the XFree86 server without an XF86Config file) that I added for 4.4 has a fallback mechanism something like this. It tries the auto-detected chipset-specific driver first (if there is one), then falls back to the vesa, fbdev, or vga drivers. I have since made some improvements to the fallback mechanism, but they were done too late to get into 4.4. The main goal of this automatic configuration is that a user can get a usable screen up and running without any manual intervention. David ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fall back drivers?
On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 05:32:33PM -0600, Jerry Haltom wrote: Ahh! I hadn't checked any of the work in 4.4 before I came up with this idea. This is wonderful. What about in the case of a broken driver where the X server is unable to start? One of the main problems I've seen Is when somebody breaks their X config, either by running some driver installation (nvidia-installer yay!) or recompiling their kernel and leaving off a third party module results in a non working X. Users would definitely would rather be at a 640x480 display running in 16 colors than a login console prompt. Or at least this is my assumption: power users are more than welcome to do whatever they want. A configuration file, even if broken, completely overrides the automatic mechanism. However, if the user finds that their configuration file is broken, they can revert to the automatic method by either removing/renaming the broken file, or specifying a non-existent file with the '-xf86config no-such-file' command line option. (I'm going to add a '-auto' option to provide a cleaner way of saying that you want to ignore an existing config file and use automatic configuration instead.) The improved fallback mechanism I mentioned could be extended so that it is available in your example, not just the auto-config case. That's a good idea. David -- David Dawes developer/release engineer The XFree86 Project www.XFree86.org/~dawes ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fall back drivers?
Jerry Haltom wrote: Ahh! I hadn't checked any of the work in 4.4 before I came up with this idea. This is wonderful. What about in the case of a broken driver where the X server is unable to start? I don't know of any driver that is broken in a way that keeps XFree86 from starting. How the display looks is a different story, though (and this case can hardly be detected) One of the main problems I've seen Is when somebody breaks their X config, either by running some driver installation (nvidia-installer yay!) or recompiling their kernel and leaving off a third party module results in a non working X. I don't know how far David has come, but I think that would be possible. PreInit() already returns a Bool, so it should be easy to fall back at that stage. The same basically applies to ScreenInit(). Users would definitely would rather be at a 640x480 display running in 16 colors than a login console prompt. Frankly, I don't think a 16 color 640x480 display is helpful as long as there is no GUI killer-tool for reconfiguring XFree86 for this kind of users. (Such users presumably also run KDE or Gnome, and at least KDE does not like 16 colors that much...) But anyway, the fallback idea is a good one IMHO. Thomas -- Thomas Winischhofer Vienna/Austria thomas AT winischhofer DOT net http://www.winischhofer.net/ twini AT xfree86 DOT org ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Fall back drivers?
On Sun, Feb 01, 2004 at 01:13:49AM +0100, Thomas Winischhofer wrote: Jerry Haltom wrote: Ahh! I hadn't checked any of the work in 4.4 before I came up with this idea. This is wonderful. What about in the case of a broken driver where the X server is unable to start? I don't know of any driver that is broken in a way that keeps XFree86 from starting. How the display looks is a different story, though (and this case can hardly be detected) I think it is more likely configuration errors (including XF86Config syntax errors), or the requested driver not existing. One of the main problems I've seen Is when somebody breaks their X config, either by running some driver installation (nvidia-installer yay!) or recompiling their kernel and leaving off a third party module results in a non working X. I don't know how far David has come, but I think that would be possible. PreInit() already returns a Bool, so it should be easy to fall back at that stage. The same basically applies to ScreenInit(). The code in the current CVS just uses Probe() failure. The newer version, not in CVS yet, handles PreInit() failure too. ScreenInit() failures should be rare, but could be handled. Frankly, I don't think a 16 color 640x480 display is helpful as long as there is no GUI killer-tool for reconfiguring XFree86 for this kind of users. (Such users presumably also run KDE or Gnome, and at least KDE does not like 16 colors that much...) The longer term goal is that configuration be handled at runtime from such a tool, but in the meantime the vesa fallback usually gives you a usable display (better than 4-bit 640x480). David -- David Dawes developer/release engineer The XFree86 Project www.XFree86.org/~dawes ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
