Message-ID: <a919884b-1e28-bf49-5de6-5cc2b6329969@redhat.com>
Date:   Wed, 15 Dec 2021 10:45:05 +0100
MIME-Version: 1.0
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/91.3.0
Subject: Re: [PATCH 07/60] drm/etnaviv: Add support for the nomodeset kernel
 parameter
Content-Language: en-US
To:     Thomas Zimmermann <tzimmermann@suse.de>,
        Lucas Stach <l.stach@pengutronix.de>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org
Cc:     Russell King <linux+etnaviv@armlinux.org.uk>,
        Maxime Ripard <mripard@kernel.org>,
        Erico Nunes <ernunes@redhat.com>
References: <20211215010008.2545520-1-javierm@redhat.com>
 <20211215010008.2545520-8-javierm@redhat.com>
 <190d0eea4c134539a500a3fae514bb6e3025a7ec.camel@pengutronix.de>
 <36d2ca10-22ae-5c15-4ab1-6ff84507c0cb@suse.de>
From:   Javier Martinez Canillas <javierm@redhat.com>
In-Reply-To: <36d2ca10-22ae-5c15-4ab1-6ff84507c0cb@suse.de>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Precedence: bulk

[adding Erico Nunes to Cc list]

On 12/15/21 10:39, Thomas Zimmermann wrote:
> (cc'ing Maxime)
> 
> Hi
> 
> Am 15.12.21 um 10:18 schrieb Lucas Stach:
>> Hi Javier,
>>
>> Am Mittwoch, dem 15.12.2021 um 01:59 +0100 schrieb Javier Martinez Canillas:
>>> According to disable Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt, this
>>> parameter can be used to disable kernel modesetting.
>>>
>>> DRM drivers will not perform display-mode changes or accelerated rendering
>>> and only the systewm system framebuffer will be available if it was set-up.
>>>
>> Etnaviv is a render-only driver, so will no perform any modesetting on
>> a display device, so I'm not sure if it's sensible to cover it under
>> the nomodeset parameter. I see that it is consistent with the other
>> drivers that deal with a combined render/display device, where the
>> render device also gets disabled with the nomodeset param, but it
>> doesn't really match the description of what the parameter is supposed
>> to do.
>>
>> I'm not opposed to take this patch for consistency reasons, but I would
>> like to hear some more opinions from other DRM folks.
> 
> Our assumption is that we want to disable all DRM drivers; except those 
> that operate on the firmware's original framebuffer. That's why the the 
> test is called drm_firmware_drivers_only().
> 

Yes, we tried to document the implicit "nomodeset" semantics to make that
clear: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/drm/drm-misc/commit/?id=b22a15a5aca34c8f59b770f858b1c21d347175e0

> We know that nomodeset is a terrible name. We only kept it because it 
> was already there, widely used, and already does what we need.
> 
> We had similar concerns with the v3d driver of vc4. Javier, maybe we 
> should leave-out such special cases for now and discuss them separately?
>

I was discussing the same with Erico (one of the lima driver developers).

Agree that we could leave those for now. Will drop from the patch-set all
the DRM drivers that don't have the DRIVER_MODESET .driver_features flag. 
 
> Best regards
> Thomas
> 

Best regards,
-- 
Javier Martinez Canillas
Linux Engineering
Red Hat