On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 8:23 AM, Keith Whitwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Major bumps once stuff went into the kernel weren't allowed at all. >> You'd need to fork the driver in any case. So we did this once or >> twice on drivers in devel trees like mach64. >> However upstream first policy should avoid this need. I'd also prefer >> to see getparam for new features instead of version checks. The linear >> version check sucks. > > This is an interesting concept that opens up some ideas for dealing > with feature deprecation, etc. > > Think about opengl's extension mechanism -- features can be exposed > through that mechanism without ever providing a guarantee of future > availability -- in fact there is no guarantee of any availability > outside the current session. Future versions of a GL driver might add > or remove extensions as desired, within the constraints of the GL > version number advertised. > > What we could see is something similar for the DRM interface -- a base > level of functionality specified by the Major/Minor numbers, but > additional extensions that may be advertised according to the whim of > the kernel module that the driver can take advantage of if present, > but which it must otherwise function correctly without...
Yep, it works a lot better to advertise the features available directly rather than just exposing an incrementing version number. This is how I redid the DRI driver interface - everything is an extension that may or may not be exposed by the driver. I would suggest to use a hybrid where we advertise individual features as suggested, but also version them. For example, if we find out that GEM needs another domain bit or something, it's nicer to be able to advertise GEM version 1.1 rather than GEM and GEM_WITH_THAT_NEW_DOMAIN_BIT. cheers, Kristian ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ -- _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
