Re: [PATCH] drm/atomic: do not branch based on the value of current->comm[0]

From: Daniel Abrecht
Date: Wed Nov 16 2022 - 04:06:23 EST


Am 2022-11-05 23:20, schrieb Jason A. Donenfeld:
This reverts 26b1d3b527e7 ("drm/atomic: Take the atomic toys away from X")

I'm in favor of reverting this commit. I've tried to get allowing to enable atomic in Xorg again in there in the past: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/533

I've no illusions of getting this through though, after all mostly the same people control what's merged into Xorg, what drm stuff gets into the kernel and who disabled it in the kernel in the first place. And there doesn't seem much interest in dealing with anything Xorg either, in the merge request I linked, someone even called Xorg "abandonware". This is also why I didn't respond here until now.

I do see value in enabling this. When I looked at this 2 years ago, there were situations where enabling atomic brought clear improvements, and I would expect that it can still improve performance on some special systems. I think the users should have the option to use it if they want or need to.

There is also the concern that this may cause a regression, but I would argue, that there never was a regression to be fixed here in the first place. There may have been that one broken application in the past, but it was just that, a broken application, not something broken by the kernel. I do not think the kernel should modify it's behavior just to work around bugs in a specific program, which have always existed, and didn't come from a changer in behavior of the kernel APIs. If a program was written wrongly, the program should be fixed, and in case of Xorg, I think it is fixed already.

This probably won't mean much coming from me, but:
Acked-by: Daniel Abrecht <public@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>