Re: Status update on 1.0

[Maxim Cournoyer]

Danny Milosavljevic <address@hidden> writes:

> On Wed, 13 Mar 2019 17:00:55 +0100
> Pierre Neidhardt <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> > The last time I tried the installer it didn't work on AMD(GPU) cards.  
>> > I'll give
>> > it another go.  
>> 
>> I've experienced the same issue and I'm quite sure this is because the 
>> installer
>> uses KMSCON which only works with the proprietary amdgpu kernel module.  
>> During
>> FOSDEM, Mathieu mentioned that KMSCON was chosen because it works better with
>> text/input encoding, if I recall correctly. 
>
> Or find out why on earth KMSCON needs the prorietary amdgpu kernel module.
>
> It's not exactly 3D graphics, so what is going on?  Furthermore, vesafb should
> always work regardless (if slowly, but who cares).

As Pierre hinted, your question should rather be as "Why on Earth does
the AMDGPU drivers needs a binary blob to provide basic features such as KMS
at all". I'm still appalled that this mammoth, 125 K lines of codes
driver got merged in the Linux kernel and is barely useful [0] when
the proprietary binary blobs are not installed.

Maxim

[0]  Booting an AMD R9 285 GPU without the binary blobs installed would
leave me to a black screen last time I tried, using Debian 9.