Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S269871AbUIDK5s (ORCPT ); Sat, 4 Sep 2004 06:57:48 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S269876AbUIDK5s (ORCPT ); Sat, 4 Sep 2004 06:57:48 -0400 Received: from pengo.systems.pipex.net ([62.241.160.193]:1221 "EHLO pengo.systems.pipex.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S269871AbUIDK5p (ORCPT ); Sat, 4 Sep 2004 06:57:45 -0400 Message-ID: <41399FA4.7050104@tungstengraphics.com> Date: Sat, 04 Sep 2004 11:57:40 +0100 From: Keith Whitwell User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8a3) Gecko/20040817 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Nick Piggin Cc: Christoph Hellwig , Dave Airlie , Jon Smirl , dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: New proposed DRM interface design References: <20040904004424.93643.qmail@web14921.mail.yahoo.com> <20040904102914.B13149@infradead.org> <41398EBD.2040900@tungstengraphics.com> <20040904104834.B13362@infradead.org> <413997A7.9060406@tungstengraphics.com> <20040904112535.A13750@infradead.org> <4139995E.5030505@tungstengraphics.com> <41399CA2.3080607@yahoo.com.au> In-Reply-To: <41399CA2.3080607@yahoo.com.au> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2674 Lines: 66 Nick Piggin wrote: > Keith Whitwell wrote: > >> Christoph Hellwig wrote: >> >>> On Sat, Sep 04, 2004 at 11:23:35AM +0100, Keith Whitwell wrote: >>> >>>>> Actually regulat users do. And they do by pulling an uptodate >>>>> kernel or >>>>> using a vendor kernel with backports. This model would work for >>>>> video drivers >>>>> aswell. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> Sure, explain to me how I should upgrade my RH-9 system to work on >>>> my new i915? >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> Download a new kernel.org kernel or petition the fedora legacy folks to >>> include a drm update. The last release RH-9 kernel has various security >>> and data integrity issues anyway, so you'd be a fool to keep running it. >> >> >> >> OK, I've found www.kernel.org, and clicked on the 'latest stable >> kernel' link. I got a file called "patch-2.6.8.1.bz2". I tried to >> install this but nothing happened. My i915 still doesn't work. What >> do I do now? >> > > Just out of interest, what would the scenario be if you do if you could > get a compatible driver? Nick, I'm sorry I couldn't quite parse your question. Ideally, everybody would have all the drivers they need right there on the media they got their distribution on, and if not, they'd be able to pull them over quick smart from their vendor online. The biggest problem the DRI had in the early years was believing that you could get a new driver released to the public though the DRI tree, then an XFree86 CVS merge and XFree86 release, a Linux kernel release, maybe making it into vendor updates for X and kernel, but more likely the next full RedHat release, and ultimately into users hands in a reasonable amount of time. Typically it was 6 months to a year for this process to roll through. Given that we seldom had access to pre-release hardware, that meant that users were getting drivers about the time that cards became obsolete. A couple of things have changed since then - DRI drivers for the i915 were available at launch of the hardware, not 6 months later. But the rest of the process is still pretty slow, which is why the DRI snapshots and downloadable binaries were a significant step forward - if nvidia in particular can get uptodate drivers quickly into the hands of unsophisticated users, you have to ask yourself why users of DRI hardware should be forced to wait 6 months and then jump through hoops just to get their video cards working. Keith - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/