[PATCH 0/4] Allow non-legacy cards to be vgaarb default

[Daniel Axtens]

Hi Ard,

> But the fact remains that we are going about this the wrong way.
> Whether a graphics card decodes legacy VGA ranges or not has *nothing*
> to do with whether or not it is in fact the primary device on a
> non-x86 system, and so I still think the VGA arbiter should be omitted
> entirely for such platforms, and Xorg should be fixed instead.

OK, I see where you're coming from. I've been trying to keep my changes
small as I don't want to end up on the hook for the almost limitless
range of problems that changing this sort of code can have, but I do
take your point that it's a bit of an ugly hack of a solution.

Say we were to change Xorg instead. What would correct Xorg behaviour
look like? Xorg would need to honour the boot_vga file if it existed so
as not to break x86, etc. So your proposed Xorg - if it couldn't find a
default card that way, and if there was no helpful config file info,
would arbitrarily pick a card that has an Xorg driver? In other words,
much like the proposed kernel approach but at a different level of the
stack?

Are there other graphical applications we care about (other than Xorg)
that would need to be patched? I'm happy to do the Xorg patch, but I
don't know if anything other than Xorg keys off the boot_vga file.

I'm not fundamentally opposed to this approach if the Xorg community is
happy with it, the kernel community is happy with it, and no-one expects
me to provide patches to any other user-space applications that depend
on boot_vga.

Regards,
Daniel