rfc/headsup: graphics driver packaging in F16+

[Bill Nottingham]

Adam Jackson (ajax at redhat.com) said: 
> There are two major package classes in Fedora that provide graphics
> drivers: xorg-x11-drv-*, and mesa-dri-drivers-*.
> 
> In F15, mesa-dri-drivers now only includes drivers with DRI2 support
> (radeon, nvidia, intel) and the software renderer; if you want all the
> older drivers you have to install mesa-dri-drivers-dri1.  This list is:
> 
>     i810, mga, r128, savage, sis, tdfx, unichrome
> 
> Basically all of this hardware is, ahem, inept.  The most featureful
> device supported by these drivers would be the MGA G550, which just
> barely manages to do DirectX 7 (comparable to a Radeon 7000 or GeForce
> 2, both ~1999 vintage).  All the others are back in the DX6 stone age.
> For comparison, the baseline for the GPU in the phone in your pocket -
> and that platform layers like clutter more or less expect - is GLES 2.0,
> which is roughly comparable to DirectX 9.  We're rapidly approaching the
> point where the software renderer is going to be a more satisfying
> experience than hardware 3d support for these chips, both for features
> and for performance.
> 
> So in my ideal world, we would simply drop the -dri1 subpackage (and for
> that matter, DRI1 support in the X server).
> 
> For 2D we've got an xorg-x11-drivers metapackage that includes, well,
> pretty much everything, and which is included in comps as a default.
> This is lame, because it means a bunch of backwater drivers end up as
> critical path and can never possibly get tested.  (Smolt says there are
> all of 3 savage users.  I assume the number of i740 users is actually
> negative.)  The list of video drivers that see any actual use is
> probably something like:
> 
>     ast, ati, cirrus, fbdev, geode, intel, mga, nouveau, openchrome,
>     qxl, sis/xgi, vesa, vmware
> 
> And input is even briefer (evdev, synaptics, wacom, vmmouse).  I'd like
> to chop the -drivers metapackage down to just this set, and either make
> a new metapackage in optional for -drivers-retrocomputing or simply list
> all the drivers there individually.  Note that since we're keeping
> drivers for fbdev and vesa we should still get graphics on most devices
> even if the user doesn't explicitly ask for a native driver.
> 
> So that's the rough plan.  Comments appreciated if I'm overlooking
> anything.

The question would be how we ensure that these additional drivers are in the
install image, or in the installed system, if necessary. Or do we not care
if they get vesa?  How would users be informed/able to install drivers if
necessary? (I don't know that PK search is good here.)

Bill