On Tue, Apr 5, 2022 at 11:18 AM Ben Cotton <bcotton(a)redhat.com> wrote:
While this will eventually reduce workload for boot/installation
components (grub2 reduces surface area, syslinux goes away entirely,
anaconda reduces surface area), the reduction in support burden
extends much further into the stack - for instance, VESA support can
be removed from the distro.
I'm flattered, but I intend to drop vesa in F37 regardless of the
outcome of this particular change. The only supported way to get to
graphics with vesa is to use Xorg, and we sincerely want to be out of
the business of maintaining Xorg the hardware server. (We'll need an X
server forever, Xwayland isn't going away, don't misread me here.)
And frankly at this point if you seriously want to use vesa it's
because you're trying to like reverse engineer some obscure card's
VBIOS, and if you're doing that you're probably building your own X
server anyway, I know I would be. Its use as an emergency driver on
physical GPUs is negligible, we have native drivers for virtually
everything made in the last 20 years. Its use as an emergency driver
in virtual machines is more statistically significant, maybe, but even
there we usually have a drm driver these days, and where we don't we
can probably club it into bochs_drm since that's the only rom anyone
bothers to use for that.
- ajax