Nouveau information and proposed plan

[Steve Conklin]

This email summarizes a discussion that took place on #ubuntu-x IRC, and
the tentative plan that was arrived at. The IRC discussion is attached
for reference.

First, there was a discussion of what is required in order to bring
Nouveau into our kernel. Nouveau brings in the entire drm-next tree,
which looks like it amounts to over 500 patches right now. This
presents a major issue for the kernel team, in how to manage that.

Looking at the Fedora 12 patch set, there is a 2.9M drm-next patch.

Assuming resolution of that issue [*], here's a tentative plan for
proceeding with Nouveau:

* We pull Nouveau and the required drm changes into karmic ASAP
* We invest in heavy testing at alpha 1 and alpha 2, and give ourselves the chance to make an assessment after A1 whether to continue.
* We also decide at that point whether to rebase to a more recent nouveau or to freeze and take selected patches through the release.

It is a bit of a tight schedule to get this into A1, since freeze is in one week.

There was also a discussion of risks vs. benefits of going to Nouveau, see the attached log.

[*] I defer to Andy and Tim. Backporting the entire drm-next
tree seems risky to me. I'd like some discussion - perhaps at
tomorrow's kernel team meeting.

Steve


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