linux-kernel - Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] staging: remove fbdev drivers

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Date:   Fri, 09 Dec 2016 22:40:26 +1100
From:   Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@...nel.crashing.org>
To:     Dave Airlie <airlied@...il.com>
Cc:     Daniel Vetter <daniel@...ll.ch>,
        Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@...e-electrons.com>,
        Linux Fbdev development list <linux-fbdev@...r.kernel.org>,
        Teddy Wang <teddy.wang@...iconmotion.com>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        dri-devel <dri-devel@...ts.freedesktop.org>,
        Tomi Valkeinen <tomi.valkeinen@...com>,
        Sudip Mukherjee <sudipm.mukherjee@...il.com>,
        Arnaud Patard <arnaud.patard@...-net.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] staging: remove fbdev drivers

On Fri, 2016-12-09 at 10:08 +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
> What are people using fbcon for that needs acceleration, this is where I get
> a bit lost.
> 
> It's a console, if you aren't sshing into the machine.
> 
> It's main purpose should just be for gathering oopses and you've a lot better
> chance of getting an oops if you don't have some sketchy gpu accel in the way.

There are other uses for systems running Linux than being a server or desktop :-)

> The acceleration that most of the 2D things provide isn't ever that
> great, and shadowing is a lot more effective if done properly.

Not with a 400Mhz ARM9 processor on a fairly high res display. In these
case basic old things like color expansion for font rendering, bit
blits and solid fills for scrolls work beautifully. Anyway I just
realized that the ARM side of the AST GPU doesn't have the accel bits
at all anyway, only the host side, so I'm back to just a dumb FB. I
still want to avoid the copies though.

>  It's a feature
> that kernel ppl obsess over but I don't get a lot of real world feedback,
> (booting 9000 scsi nodes with debug on takes a long time was possibly
> something I heard once, and I think we resolved).

Ben.