Graphics Team Meeting notes from 2018-10-17

[Warner Losh]

The graphics team has started having regular conference calls to keep
things moving along and to expand the knowledge base of graphics and
graphics issues. To that end, I'll be taking notes during these meetings
and publishing them here. This is an experiment, so please send me feedback
on how useful you find this.

We plan on abstracting this down into the quarterly reports as well.

Warner

2018-10-17:

   -

   drm-legacy, what's happening in 12 - status update
   -

      Warner has a pending update to drm/drm2 in base to change the package
      to install. For drm use drm-legacy-kmod for drm2 use drm-kmod on all
      platforms.
      -

      Some really really old devices in drm2 in base aren’t in drm-kmod. We
      should just document what is affected once we know.
      -

      “Generally, hardware that’s 8 or 10 years old or newer works with
      drm-kmod packages, however, testing it is impossible for the
current team.
      For hardware released prior to 2014, you may need to try
drm-legacy-kmod if
      drm-kmod installed drivers don’t work. Drm-kmod is required for hardware
      released since 2013. The graphics team only commits to support
for hardware
      released in since 2013. If you have hardware supported by
drm-kmod, you are
      strongly encouraged to use drm-kmod because its support is much much
      better.” -- Note to add to UPDATING and release notes.
      -

      Loader blacklist is in the tree
      -

      Bsdinstall hasn’t been updated to try to install drm-kmod.
      -

   collaboration and project management tools
   -

      Tried Asana but found it lacking
      -

      Trello to be evaluated soon
      -

      Github may have a track issues w/o owners that Niclas can use to know
      what to do next, Kanban style, as well as keep team updated on others.
      -

      Kanblanflow.com
      -

      Gitlab?
      -

   xf86-video-ati and drm-legacy (pr 231884)
   -

      These were updated a couple weeks ago. There’s a regression for
      drm-legacy and xf86-video-ati this PR covers. Amdgpu support was
quite old
      and was updated and the ati driver was updated at the same time. We may
      need to bring back the old ddx port to use with drm-legacy because newer
      versions of the driver aren’t compatible with the new xf86-video-ati, so
      there will copy the old version of xf86-video-ati to xf86-video-at-legacy
      for people still using drm-legacy as a favor to the old user affected by
      this issue.
      -

   drm-devel-kmod regressions and stolen memory
   -

      In review right now. First round or two of comments have been dealt
      with, but it’s not quite ready to commit yet. We can merge to
stable/12 if
      this isn’t complete before the branch. Could do it in the
driver, but doing
      it early boot works around a bug in many BIOSes that require doing it
      early. Plan A is to get this in, Plan B is to do it only in the driver.
      We’ll decide in the Nov 7 meeting which plan we’ll do.
      -

      Johannes L will ping reviewers to check the code.
      -

   mesa and testing protocol
   -

      Need to move mesa to llvm70 (pr 230789)
      -

      Do this at the same time as gecko, but that team proceeded more
      quickly, so mesa needs to catch up as quickly as possible so we
don’t need
      two different versions of llvm.
      -

      Need to have smoke / runtime test before committing.
      -

      Will need to be merged to the quarterly branch if gecko is merged
      there as well.
      -

      Mesa 18.2 is out and there is a patch submitted to update the port
      (pr 230298). It’s been lightly tested by submitter, but needs more
      extensive testing since we’ve had issue in the past with incomplete
      testing. It’s unclear that we have to have 18.2, and it represents a big
      risk on the 12.0R timeline. Definitely want to do it post 12.0R, however.
      -

      Testing Protocol needs to be discussed between Niclas and Johannes D
      to establish how to test big updates to the graphics stack (x
server, mesa,
      and other big things) to mitigate regressions discovered after they are
      rolled out.
      -

   Wayland
   -

      Was updated w/o approval from the graphics team. Not worth fighting
      to revert, but now requires EVDEV in the kernel now).
      -

   input stack
   -

      We want to enable EVDEV by default so we can use libinput (required
      by Wayland)
      -

      Need much testing on a lot of different input devices
      -

      There are reports of regression with things like ddb> prompt that
      need to be investigated before people will be comfortable
turning EVDEV on
      by default in GENERIC.
      -

      libinput/EVDEV enables a lot of additional devices and it’s desirable
      to have. Linux moving this direction, so we’ll encounter additional
      friction the longer we delay in resolving these issues. Taken together,
      it’s a no-brainer we want this.
      -

   Quarterly status report
   -

      We’ll setup something on the current freebsd-graphics github. Niclas
      wil set it up.
      -

      We’ll start with the meeting minutes and write them to be a higher
      level and briefer.
      -

      Warner to send out each meeting’s minutes to x11@
      -

   Do we want a mail alias?
   -

      Used to be one a long time ago. It’s been removed to non-use. Should
      we reconstruct it? Do we want it?... No. Not today. Our current lists are
      fine, but we’ll revisit in the future if that changes.
      -

   next meeting (time change due to DST?)
   -

      Move it to one hour later UTC time so it remains the same local time
      for everybody.

Attended:

Niclas Zeising (zeising@)

Johannes Lundberg

Warner Losh (imp@)

Johannes M. Dietrich (jmd@)