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

[Alan Coopersmith]

Solaris still ships the NVIDIA accelerated driver and GNOME desktop - neither 
one requires us to provide DRI/KMS support for other graphics devices in our
kernel, it just means we'll be sticking to Xorg to drive that desktop instead
of moving to Wayland like other platforms, and won't have acceleration for
non-NVIDIA devices.

	-alan-

On 8/2/24 14:52, Ignacio Soriano Hernandez wrote:
> Alan,
> 
> Ok, having said that what does it mean for Solaris as well? No more accelerated NVIDIA? No more desktop for Solaris?
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Iggi
> 
>> Am 02.08.2024 um 22:37 schrieb Alan Coopersmith via openindiana-discuss <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org>:
>>
>> 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-
>>
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-- 
         -Alan Coopersmith-                 alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
          Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris