rfc/headsup: graphics driver packaging in F16+

[Al Dunsmuir]

Hello Nathaniel,

On Tuesday, April 12, 2011, 2:01:26 PM, Nathaniel McCallum wrote:

> On Tue, 2011-04-12 at 13:57 -0400, Casey Dahlin wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 01:48:19PM -0400, Nathaniel McCallum wrote:
>> > 
>> > With this approach, you have lost a critical feature: the ability for
>> > you to change your hardware (or move the software bits to a different
>> > computer) and have everything automatically work.
>> > 
>> > Nathaniel
>> 
>> You lose it for a couple of strange usecases though:
>> 
>> 1) Moving from a card that is up to date in what it supports to an older
>> card that isn't (rare).
>> 
>> 2) Moving from one crappy ancient card to another (plausible, but still
>> rare).
>> 
>> The vesa driver should mean some workable video support in either case,
>> and from there, if we were really, truly concerned, we could detect the
>> need for the driver and prompt to install it. That's starting to sound
>> like the bad old days of kudzu though, and I'd be surprised if anyone
>> really felt this was worth that effort.

> I think losing it in those cases is probably acceptable.  My thought is
> that the disk space for drivers is minimal, lets just support everything
> (or at least the current stuff) in a single install.  My concern isn't
> moving to and/or between rare old cards.  My concern is moving from
> nouveau to intel or radeon...  The "big" drivers should definitely be
> installed on every system, regardless of its hardware.

> Nathaniel

For the Intel arches, it may make sense to have all kinds of X drivers
available  by default. For the secondary arches, the user requirements
and physical environment.

On   zSeries,  there  is no relevant graphics hardware.  When one runs
X,   it   is   the   application   side   only  via a remove X display
server on another system.

For  ARM,  the  root  filesystem  is set up with an appropriate kernel
(likely  customized)  and  a  single X display driver.  On ARM, system
space is typically quite tight.

Heck, even Intel-based netbooks and tablets don't have all _that_ much
storage.

Whatever  decisions  are  made  should  take these differences between
arches into account and allow appropriate default and custom setups.
Al