[PATCH 9/9] kernel/x86: remove DRM support

[Philip Prindeville]

> On Apr 27, 2023, at 3:21 AM, Thibaut <hacks at slashdirt.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> Le 27 avr. 2023 à 02:11, Elliott Mitchell <ehem+openwrt at m5p.com> a écrit :
>> 
>> On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 12:50:52AM +0200, Stefan Lippers-Hollmann wrote:
>>> On 2023-04-19, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
>>>> Direct Rendering Manager is mainly for running X (possibly Wayland
>>>> too).  As OpenWRT is meant for networking devices, there is no need
>>>> for the support to be present.
>>> 
>>> That is only partially true, the Linux kernel is making a strong push
>>> away from deprecated (FB_*) graphics drivers to DRM based ones, with 
>>> kernel based mode setting this is getting more (any) attention for 
>>> console support as well. Even without getting anywhere near X/ Wayland,
>>> there is more than just a 80x25 tty on real hardware (and even VMs).
>> 
>> Real x86 hardware often has the capability to use a serial port as
>> console.  The conventional UEFI implementation fully supports this use
>> case.  I can well believe a number of manufacturers disabling the
>> functionality though.
>> 
>> VMs *can* have more than a 80x25 tty.  By the time you're getting to 4
>> or more VMs you should be thinking about disabling the functionality due
>> to the heavy overhead (unless the OS in the VM doesn't support serial
>> consoles).
> 
> You seem to assume that x86 is only/mainly run on VMs.
> That is not necessarily the case, and I see no reason to degrade device support that way.
> 
> Would you mind documenting the measurable gains from your changes, so we have some metric to assess their relevance?
> 
> Cheers,
> T


True enough.  I have net4801 (Geode), net5501 (Geode), alix2 (Geode), apu6 (GX-412TC), and Supermicro Xeon D1548 based routers right in front of me.

Let's also not forget that Openwrt is used downstream in many projects that we have limited visibility into.


-Philip