[RFC] Deprecation and removal of the drm2 driver

[Niclas Zeising]

[ Cross posted to freebsd-current@ and freebsd-x11 at .  Please respect 
reply-to and send all replies to freebsd-x11 at .  Thanks! ]


Hi!
I propose that we remove the old drm2 driver (sys/dev/drm2) from 
FreeBSD.  I suggest the driver is marked as deprecated in 11.x and 
removed from 12.0, as was done for other drivers recently.  Some 
background and rationale:

The drm2 driver was the original port of a KMS driver to FreeBSD.  It 
was done by Konstantin Belousov to support Intel graphics cards, and 
later extended by Jean-Sébastien Pédron as well as Konstantin to match 
what's in Linux 3.8.  This included unstable support from Haswell, but 
nothing newer than that.

For quite some time now we have had the graphics/drm-stable-kmod and 
graphics/drm-next-kmods which provides support for modern AMD and Intel 
graphics cards.  These ports, together with the linuxkpi, or lkpi, has 
made it significantly easier to port and update our graphics drivers. 
Further, these new drivers cover the same drivers as the old drm2 driver.

What does the community think?  Is there anyone still using the drm2 
driver on 12-CURRENT?  If so, what is preventing you from switching to 
the port?

Thank you
Regards
-- 
Niclas Zeising
FreeBSD x11/graphics team