[Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] How can we treat staging drivers better?

[Daniel Vetter]

On Wed, Sep 5, 2018 at 4:29 PM, Sean Paul <seanpaul at chromium.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 5, 2018 at 10:23 AM Greg KH <gregkh at linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 05, 2018 at 10:08:00AM -0400, Sean Paul wrote:
>> > > Which ones are you interested in?  I'd always prefer to hand off staging
>> > > drivers to an existing subsystem but it's not always clear who that
>> > > should be.
>> >
>> > In the case of vboxvideo, we won't accept it in drm since it's not an
>> > atomic driver. staging's bar for entry was lower, so the driver was
>> > stuck in there. Perhaps we would have been better to take it in drm
>> > behind a config, but that's not ideal either.
>>
>> for vboxvideo, I am pretty sure I got an "it's ok to put it there" from
>> the DRM maintainers before I accepted it.  So they know it is there :)
>>
>
> Oh for sure, I didn't mean to imply it was there without our knowledge
> (reading my mail back the implication is definitely there, apologies).
> I think the narrative was "ack to put it there, but it'll cause pain".
> If the atomic conversion was done expediently, it wouldn't be so bad,
> but it's starting to become an anchor (IMO).

Yeah I acked it for -staging. I have regrets now, but next time around
I'm probably as gullible as ever.

>> If it's not ever going to be merged, maybe we should just drop it?
>
> Yeah, I'm fine with that. It doesn't seem like anyone is super
> motivated to do the atomic conversion any time soon.
>
> Generally speaking, I think the vboxvideo experiment has shown that
> staging isn't a good fit for us. For subsystems with less churn or
> surrounding infrastructure, it's probably much less of an issue.

It slowed down a bit, but past 3 years we've merged like 2-3 new
atomic drivers per release. Now we mostly have a driver for each kind
of display IP out there, so a lot more boils down to adding support
for different variants of the same hw. So it's clearly possible to
land a simple drm atomic modeset driver without too onerous amounts of
work. vboxvideo otoh seems to not really move - looking at git log all
the changes are just general refactorings, no one seems to do the one
and only thing (cut it over to atomic, probably best as a
drm_simple_display_pipe driver) that we want. And it's now a full year
in-tree.

So all the pain (we have to refactor yet another driver using outdated
helpers/api), no gain (doesn't seem to pull in more contributors or
more bug reporters afaict) for the subsystem. Ack on removing it.

Thanks, Daniel
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
+41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch