This email summarizes a discussion that took place on #ubuntu-x IRC, and the tentative plan that was arrived at. The IRC discussion is attached for reference.
First, there was a discussion of what is required in order to bring Nouveau into our kernel. Nouveau brings in the entire drm-next tree, which looks like it amounts to over 500 patches right now. This presents a major issue for the kernel team, in how to manage that. Looking at the Fedora 12 patch set, there is a 2.9M drm-next patch. Assuming resolution of that issue [*], here's a tentative plan for proceeding with Nouveau: * We pull Nouveau and the required drm changes into karmic ASAP * We invest in heavy testing at alpha 1 and alpha 2, and give ourselves the chance to make an assessment after A1 whether to continue. * We also decide at that point whether to rebase to a more recent nouveau or to freeze and take selected patches through the release. It is a bit of a tight schedule to get this into A1, since freeze is in one week. There was also a discussion of risks vs. benefits of going to Nouveau, see the attached log. [*] I defer to Andy and Tim. Backporting the entire drm-next tree seems risky to me. I'd like some discussion - perhaps at tomorrow's kernel team meeting. Steve
(05:32:28 PM) sconklin: heya (05:32:33 PM) RAOF: Howdie. (05:32:51 PM) bryce: sconklin, we were just discussing kernel stuff needed for -nouveau/kms (and radeon kms) (05:33:12 PM) bryce: in particular, it appears to need drm-next (05:33:23 PM) bryce: sconklin, <RAOF> Here's a list of git commits for nouveau http://pastebin.com/f5c80954e (05:33:27 PM) jcristau: RAOF: shouldn't be too hard to extract just what nouveau needs from -next (05:33:31 PM) RAOF: So, getting nouveau in the kernel by merging from their kernel tree implies merging in drm-next, because they frequently merge drm-next into their tree. (05:33:43 PM) jcristau: wel, hopefully :) (05:33:58 PM) jcristau: +l (05:35:10 PM) RAOF: If we want to add nouveau by means of a mega-patch we'll need to carefully merge in the drm changes nouveau requires, and check that they don't break our other drm drivers. (05:35:43 PM) sconklin: Someone told me that the drm-next commits required for nouveau were not stable with intel harwdare, anyone know about that? It was a hallway conversation at UDS (05:36:16 PM) RAOF: I don't know about that, no. (05:36:25 PM) bryce: jbarnes, ^^ ? (05:36:37 PM) tormod: radeon KMS will probably need some drm-next stuff also (05:37:05 PM) sconklin: here's my general thinking about all of this - please say something if I'm on crack . . . (05:37:25 PM) RAOF: If we want to test drm-next I can trivially extend nouveau-kernel-source to build the other drm drivers, too. (05:37:35 PM) sconklin: I'm beginning to understand the risks to nouveau, and there are a lot of them, and it also impacts our normal code flow. (05:37:57 PM) sconklin: The best thing would be to get it into the first alpha and see if it falls over. (05:38:38 PM) sconklin: I still don't have a solid understanding of what our benefits are as a distro to using nouveau (05:38:52 PM) sconklin: I do understand the benefits to nouveau. (05:39:21 PM) sconklin: I also see that Fedora appears to be dealing with a pile of graphics stability issues rigth now (05:39:27 PM) bryce: sconklin, one of the main benefits we gain is a more active upstream (compared with -nv) (05:39:55 PM) bryce: (and I admit "active upstream" can be a con as well as a pro depending on the situation...) (05:40:03 PM) sconklin: bryce: understood, but that upstream pretty much admits that they aren't ready for relases or a distro. (05:40:29 PM) sconklin: But . . . this could really get them some huge benefits also (05:40:36 PM) RAOF: Which is a pity, because they're a much better nvidia driver than nv. (05:40:48 PM) jcristau: didn't stop fedora. but then rh hired one of the nouveau developers. (05:41:29 PM) bryce: sconklin, I still expect that most nvidia owners will still just use -nouveau as a bridge to installing -nvidia. (05:41:36 PM) sconklin: yeah, and trust me I know that "because Fedora does/doesn't do something" isn't a good reason to go either way on a decision. (05:42:05 PM) jcristau: fair enough :) (05:42:17 PM) jk- [[email protected]] entered the room. (05:42:18 PM) RAOF: bryce: I agree. Nouveau is a much better 2d driver, but most people are going to want 3d. (05:42:20 PM) sconklin: bryce, and are all the drm bits either compatible or selectable between -nouveau and -nvidia? (05:42:24 PM) tormod: what RHEL will do is maybe more relevant (05:42:43 PM) RAOF: nvidia doesn't have any drm bits. (05:42:47 PM) jcristau: sconklin: nvidia doesn't use drm at all (05:42:58 PM) sconklin: tormod: not necessarily - RHEL and Ubuntu have very different user bases. (05:43:04 PM) bryce: sconklin, nvidia does its own thing (05:43:17 PM) RAOF: A problem nouveau _may_ introduce is binding to the hardware in the initramfs and preventing nvidia's kernel module from loading. I haven't tested that. (05:43:30 PM) jbarnes: bryce, sconklin: I haven't heard anything about that either (05:43:31 PM) sconklin: bryce: sorry, I meant "any of the things in drm-next" (05:43:41 PM) jbarnes: nouveau and intel should be mostly independent in the kernel (05:43:42 PM) bryce: sconklin, ahh (05:44:23 PM) sconklin: ok I think I drifted off topic a little. (05:44:39 PM) RAOF: jbarnes: But nouveau requires a different drm.ko to the one we ship, and that's shared. (05:44:52 PM) sconklin: bryce: the ptches that you pastebin'd - is that the entire drm-next diff from our tree? (05:45:20 PM) jbarnes: RAOF: yeah but it's mainly TTM functionality there afaik (05:45:23 PM) bryce: RAOF, sconklin, so really what -nouveau buys us is an out-of-the-box kms 2D experience on first boot (ooh nice boot), followed by installation of -nvidia and the usual teeth grinding on binary blobs ;-) (05:45:28 PM) jbarnes: unless they've also made some core mode setting changes or something (05:45:53 PM) bryce: sconklin, no I think RAOF selected the specific ones needed. RAOF? (05:45:59 PM) RAOF: sconklin: It's the full diff of everything nouveau touches against our tree. (05:46:06 PM) sconklin: bryce, RAOF - plus we support open development, and provide some solid testing base and bug reporting for upstream. (05:46:34 PM) RAOF: sconklin: Upstream will unlikely to be terribly interested in our bugs, unless we track git closely. (05:46:52 PM) tormod: don't tell Bryce there will be more bug reports :P (05:47:03 PM) bryce: sconklin, right, and while in the near term you're right that this is to upstream's benefit mostly, since it's an LTS it hopefully means in the long term we'll be more able to deploy more fixes than if we stuck with -nv (05:47:14 PM) sconklin: RAOF: I intend to offer them the option of linking with lp through the upstream plugin, they probably won't want to. (05:47:45 PM) bryce: although that's kind of hand-wavy... -nouveau is developing fast enough that I suspect backporting fixes to the LTS would only be realistic for some months before the codebases are too divergent. (05:48:40 PM) sconklin: bryce: right. and I can forsee a degenerate situation where we end up sort of stuck with the LTS, but the testing we did there lets us turn our a really good M release (05:48:44 PM) ripps [[email protected]] entered the room. (05:48:57 PM) RAOF: bryce: I support that assessment, although the bottleneck would be the kernel, rather than libdrm (because that's much more nicely isolated) (05:49:50 PM) sconklin: Yes, what I was describing was the kernel. But also remember this - that starting with Lucid we'll probably also have the ability to run later kernels on Lucid userspace (05:49:52 PM) RAOF: We could track git closely in xorg-edgers and require bug reporters to retry with that; upstream would likely be interested in _those_ bugs. (05:50:07 PM) sconklin: which gives people a choice (05:50:40 PM) sconklin: so I'd like to propose a plan (for the kernel at least) (05:51:13 PM) sconklin: That we (very soon) pull nouveau and the required drm-next into Lucid. (05:51:56 PM) sconklin: That we invest in heavy testing at alpha 1 and alpha 2, and give ourselves the chance to make an assessment after A1 whether to continue. (05:52:21 PM) sconklin: and whether to rebase to a more recent nouveau or to freeze and take selected patches. (05:52:55 PM) sconklin: If we freeze, then there's a good chance that by the time Lucid releases, linus's tree will have caught up with the drm-next that was used for nouveau. (05:52:56 PM) bryce: sconklin, +1 sounds good to me (05:53:24 PM) RAOF: +1 from me, too. (05:53:32 PM) sconklin: and we'll just be supporting nouveau + selected patches, without any drm sync problems. (05:54:21 PM) sconklin: ok, I'll write this up and send it around to the kernel group (and who else) - and which mailing lists am I not on that I need to be? - X related? (05:54:41 PM) tormod: linus's tree catch up with drm-next, isn't that 2.6.33 by definition? (05:54:54 PM) jcristau: tormod: rc1 :) (05:55:15 PM) tormod: and lucid has settled for 2.6.32 right (05:55:19 PM) sconklin: yeah, I think that's right. (05:55:24 PM) sconklin: so we won't get it. (05:55:51 PM) bryce: sconklin, [email protected] (05:55:53 PM) sconklin: I would say here that pulling in drm-next is subject to veto by the kernel ack process (05:56:06 PM) sconklin: s/would/should/ (05:56:17 PM) sconklin: I can't make those decisions unilaterally (05:56:30 PM) RAOF: I wouldn't expect as much. (05:56:45 PM) sconklin: No, just trying to be clear (05:57:13 PM) tormod: I wonder about alpha-1 that's like next week, right. shouldn't this be dogfood for at least a week? sounds like sorting out the right drm-next commits is not trivial (05:57:35 PM) sconklin: so I'll join the ubuntu-x list and then send this to both that and the kernel list, and shout if I get anything wrong, please (05:58:29 PM) sconklin: tormod: I know, and I'm getting beat up about some other unrelated things at the moment, so let me discuss the priorities with some people and see if I can get some help (05:58:38 PM) tormod: you'll get broad coverage but maybe more than you'd like (06:00:19 PM) bryce: tormod, alpha-1 is dec 10th (06:00:30 PM) sconklin: I've seen a number of opinions that graphics got worse from Jaunty->Karmic, I don't want to set up any sort of trend. And also, there are people irate over Fedora because 3d support is not good, but no one really tested 3d until after the release, and I think we'll see the same thing happen. (06:00:41 PM) tormod: bryce, which means freeze on 8th (06:00:48 PM) bryce: tormod, right
-- Ubuntu-x mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-x
