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

On Fri, 2016-12-09 at 09:34 +0100, Daniel Vetter wrote:

Yeah if you have discrete vram then your dumb display driver isn't all
that pretty. We essentially just have the few drivers Dave hacked up to be
able to boot some servers. And there's definitely lots of room for more
shared code for those, and also some better infrastructure and helpers to
share more cod and make them better.

The massive pile of dumb framebuffers we all merged over the past 2 years
all use system/dma memory for scanout, and for those we have the very nice
cma helpers that take care of everything for you. 

Do they work if the system/DMA memory has to be physically contiguous
and at a fixed address ? The AST "ARM side" GPU is like that.

So it is possible, only reason vram dumb buffers look worse is that there's
only 3 and no one cares about them, vs about 20 and a very active community
of contributors (also for core drm improvements) for the other case.

Well, we could move offb to drm while at it I suppose that would be another
one (offb is the "dumb driver based on pre-programmed output by firmware).

Althought the MXSFB driver that just landed does use ttm and vram, so
maybe that's now improving too.

Cheers,
Ben.