Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please

From	Daniel Vetter <daniel@ffwll.ch>
Newsgroups	linux.kernel
Subject	Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please
Date	2015-09-24 17:30 +0200
Message-ID	<qcgD7-70f-3@gated-at.bofh.it> (permalink)
References	<qcdOV-2V8-7@gated-at.bofh.it> <qce8i-3ho-13@gated-at.bofh.it>
Organization	linux.* mail to news gateway

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On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 02:46:21PM +0200, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Thu, 24 Sep 2015 15:27:01 +0300, Tomi Valkeinen wrote:
> 
> > fbdev is (more or less) maintained, but it's a deprecated framework. All
> > new Linux display drivers should be done on DRM.
> > 
> > So let's not add any more new fbdev drivers.
> > 
> > I will continue to maintain the current fbdev drivers, and I don't mind
> > adding some new features to those current drivers, as long as the amount
> > of code required to add the features stays sensible.
> > 
> > I see we have three fbdev drivers in staging: xgifb, fbtft and sm750fb,
> > and the question is what to do with those.
> > 
> > xgifb was added in 2010, and is still in staging.
> > 
> > fbtft looks like maybe some kind of framework on top of fbdev, with
> > fbtft specific subdrivers... I didn't look at it in detail, but my gut
> > says "never".
> 
> fbtft mainly drives some very simple I2C-based or SPI-based displays,
> and DRM is I believe overkill for such displays. Last time I talked
> with Laurent Pinchart about such drivers, I believe he said that such
> simple drivers could probably continue to use the fbdev subsystem.
> 
> Or are there some plans to make the writing of DRM drivers for very
> simple/trivial devices a bit simpler?

Since years I'm trying to sell someone on implementing support for
drm_simple_outputs which would collapse the crtc->encoder->connector
chain into 1 entity. Would be trivial to implement and then trivial to
write simple drivers on top of that. And besides that drm already has
piles of reallly simple drivers with just one output and one framebuffer.

There's no reason not to use drm for gfx drivers at all.
-Daniel
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
http://blog.ffwll.ch
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Thread

No more new fbdev drivers, please Tomi Valkeinen <tomi.valkeinen@ti.com> - 2015-09-24 14:30 +0200
  Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com> - 2015-09-24 14:50 +0200
    Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Austin S Hemmelgarn <ahferroin7@gmail.com> - 2015-09-24 17:30 +0200
      Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Alex Deucher <alexdeucher@gmail.com> - 2015-09-24 17:40 +0200
      Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Daniel Vetter <daniel@ffwll.ch> - 2015-09-24 18:00 +0200
        Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Austin S Hemmelgarn <ahferroin7@gmail.com> - 2015-09-24 18:20 +0200
        Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Ondrej Zary <linux@rainbow-software.org> - 2015-09-24 19:20 +0200
          Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Daniel Vetter <daniel@ffwll.ch> - 2015-09-24 20:10 +0200
    Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Daniel Vetter <daniel@ffwll.ch> - 2015-09-24 17:30 +0200
      Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org> - 2015-09-26 10:30 +0200
        Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Alex Deucher <alexdeucher@gmail.com> - 2015-09-26 19:10 +0200
          Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org> - 2015-09-26 20:10 +0200
            Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please David Herrmann <dh.herrmann@gmail.com> - 2015-09-26 20:20 +0200
              Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org> - 2015-09-26 20:50 +0200
                Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Rob Clark <robdclark@gmail.com> - 2015-09-26 22:50 +0200
                Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Dave Airlie <airlied@gmail.com> - 2015-09-27 00:00 +0200
                Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Emil Velikov <emil.l.velikov@gmail.com> - 2015-09-30 14:00 +0200
              Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com> - 2015-09-28 09:50 +0200
                Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Daniel Vetter <daniel@ffwll.ch> - 2015-09-28 14:40 +0200
                Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com> - 2015-09-29 10:30 +0200
                Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com> - 2015-09-29 10:40 +0200
            Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Bernie Thompson <bernie@plugable.com> - 2015-09-28 23:00 +0200
            Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Daniel Vetter <daniel@ffwll.ch> - 2015-09-29 09:10 +0200
  Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Aaro Koskinen <aaro.koskinen@iki.fi> - 2015-09-25 11:00 +0200
    Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Ondrej Zary <linux@rainbow-software.org> - 2015-09-25 13:10 +0200
  Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Sudip Mukherjee <sudipm.mukherjee@gmail.com> - 2015-09-26 09:20 +0200
    Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Ilia Mirkin <imirkin@alum.mit.edu> - 2015-09-26 09:40 +0200
  Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Noralf Trønnes <noralf@tronnes.org> - 2015-09-27 15:20 +0200
    Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Emil Velikov <emil.l.velikov@gmail.com> - 2015-09-27 18:10 +0200
      Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Noralf Trønnes <noralf@tronnes.org> - 2015-09-29 01:00 +0200
        Re: No more new fbdev drivers, please Daniel Vetter <daniel@ffwll.ch> - 2015-09-29 09:10 +0200

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