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

On 08/12/16 03:01, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:

On Wed, 2016-11-23 at 10:03 +0200, Tomi Valkeinen wrote:

quoted

Hi,

Since the fbdev framework is in maintenance mode and all new display drivers
should be made with the DRM framework, remove the fbdev drivers from staging.

Note: the patches are created with git format-patch -D, so they can't be
applied. Only for review.

I missed the discussion where this decision was made, I admit I am
unimpressed by it.

DRM drivers don't strike me as suitable for small/slow cores with dumb
framebuffers or simple 2D only accel, such as the one found in the ASpeed
BMCs.

Then the DRM framework should be improved to be suitable.

With drmfb you basically have to shadow everything into memory & copy
over everything, and locks you out of simple 2D accel. For a simple text
console the result is orders of magnitude slower and memory hungry than
a simple fbdev.

I don't think that's true. You can have a single fbdev buffer and blit
there all you want, afaik.

Not everything has a powerful 3D GPU.

We don't use GPU on OMAPs (except for 3D).

 Tomi