[OpenIndiana-discuss] gfxdrm/OpenGL error with latest update

[Alan Coopersmith]

On 8/2/24 12:48, Tim Mooney via openindiana-discuss wrote:
> In regard to: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] gfxdrm/OpenGL error with latest...:
> 
>> On 8/2/24 10:39, Till Wegmueller wrote:
>>> This is a known issue since the last Mesa update and seems to come from the 
>>> changes Solaris did to it's platform Support by disabling Intel completely 
>>> Upstream for Solaris and hardlinking the driver to Swrast.
>>
>> Solaris no longer includes any DRI/KMS drivers, so illumos-based platforms
>> which do will have to diverge from Solaris here.
> 
> Alan, if you have some time could you expand on that a little?  What
> went into the decision to ditch DRI/KMS in Solaris?
> 
> I'm not questioning the decision, just interested in what went into.

Simple cost/benefit analysis - the cost of paying engineers to port the
whole framework from Linux and keeping up-to-date with a rapidly changing
upstream was determined to be more than the benefit to our customer base
of doing it.  I expect a similar analysis is why commercially backed,
server-oriented distros like SmartOS & OmniOS haven't ported them either.

Obviously the costs and benefits will be different for a volunteer driven
community project like OI that actually has desktop support as a major
focus.

One observation we heard from the BSD folks doing similar work when we
started doing the port back in the OpenSolaris days was "It doesn't work
to port the drivers to your kernel, you have to port your kernel to these
drivers" - emphasizing how much of the work you have to do is on the kernel
side to provide the interfaces and feature set these drivers require, and
that if you try to modify the drivers instead to match your kernel you'll
never be able to keep up because the drivers change so fast to keep up with
the enormous rates of change in GPU hardware and userspace graphics APIs.

	-alan-