u/RabbitsandRubber

Hello again all,

I was wondering if any of you could point me to some resources to learn more about the process of porting the Linux DRM subsystem and GPU drivers over to OpenBSD (and Linux's DRM sub-system itself). How hard is it to import all that code to support modern Intel and AMD GPUs? What does OpenBSD do differently compared to Linux when using the DRM API?

I've had no issues with the GPU drivers on my modernish AMD GPU. But last night something went wonky with my ability to decode video using the GPU (playing video in mpv using yt-dlp). It fell back to using the CPU to render videos. I thought maybe yt-dlp needed an update because google broke things again but that was not the case. Later on I closed the browser I'd had open for weeks (Firefox) and it refused to run when I tried to start it again. It core dumped and threw an error related to the DRM subsystem that I didn't write down. Since I force enabled some stuff in about:config related to GPU acceleration.

I need to grep through logs to see if I can figure out what went wrong. I had a working system otherwise. A reboot fixed it but I'd never had this issue with OpenBSD before even if I left the system on for weeks. I wonder if it was related to it being suspended for multiple days.

All of this got me wondering about how the OpenBSD kernel interacts with modern GPUs and how much effort is required to port all that stuff over from Linux. I've heard modern GPU drivers are a mess (tons of code) but I've never tried looking at the code myself.

I am currently using the gtk2 binary of emacs from the ports tree and it has been working fine for several years now. I know a lot of people dislike emacs and I'm considering moving away from it myself. But so far haven't found anything that can replace org-mode and emacs is helpful for viewing several types of documents like epubs, cbz, pdf and various other misc. files. I also like bookmarks and take advantage of many other things for creating documents.

I have been wanting to rid my system of gtk totally for awhile now. But as far as I know it's impossible if I want a modern web browser (I use firefox mainly but also have the chromium port installed just in case).

I'm worried emacs will remove support for gtk2 in the near future like a lot of gtk projects have done. I see there is the option to use motif instead although I've not used it in many years. I was going to check it out but it's no longer offered as a binary. I checked out the ports tree with CVS and attempted to build the motif version from source. But it failed with an error I can't remember at the moment (it was months ago when I tried this).

I'm wondering why the motif option is still offered at all if it fails to build. I tried searching on the ports mailing list but I didn't see any discussion about it. Is anyone running the motif version of the port and if so how did you get it going? Will I lose any features if I move over to motif instead of using the gtk2 version? I didn't find much information about this in the emacs documentation.

Concerning the kernel:

I know it's discourage to use anything but GENERIC but I'd like to help more with testing and I'm wondering if there are any advantages if I build from source. I've been used to building kernels from source in most other OSs I've used over the years. I know there are some obscure features that aren't enabled by default in the GENERIC kernel because they aren't stable on all platforms. Is there anything I could get on amd64 going if I build from source instead of using GENERIC?

I'd like to get more familiar with building ports from src along with the base system and Xenocara. Xenocara is a bit of a black box to me at the moment. I'm pretty familiar with Xorg but I'd like to understand the Xenocara build system and changes that were made in it compared to upstream.

With the recent stuff happening with Xorg's upstream and the fact that they haven't accepted any patches from Xenocara in a long time (or ever?) I'm curious if there are any plans to try and upstream some changes to one of the forks. I believe Xlibre is the most popular right now but I haven't really looked too deeply in to it. All I know is they forked Xorg from an older version for some reason and there was a big stink about it when it was initially announced. But I see that some Linux distros are offering it now and I think a couple have moved to using it by default. Is there anything worthwhile in their fork that Xenocara could benefit from? At the very least they seem more open to accepting diffs than FreeDesktop. Maybe they'd be willing to share some of the burden of maintaining the patch set. Or has Xenocara diverged so much at this point that it'd be a huge pain to switch to a different upstream?