[arch-general] [RFC] Potentially deprecating primus, bumblebee, virtualGL and primus_vk

[Emil Velikov]

On Tue, 12 Jan 2021 at 15:07, Archange <archange at archlinux.org> wrote:
>
> Le 04/12/2020 à 14:06, Emil Velikov via arch-general a écrit :
> > On Fri, 4 Dec 2020 at 12:55, Lone_Wolf <lone_wolf at klaas-de-kat.nl> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 04-12-2020 13:50, Giancarlo Razzolini via arch-general wrote:
> >>> Em dezembro 4, 2020 9:27 Emil Velikov via arch-general escreveu:
> >>>> I would love to hear the input from the respective maintainers and the
> >>>> overall Arch developer base as a whole.
> >>>>
> >>> As the maintainer for both bumblebee and prime-run, I don't see the
> >>> need for deprecation, yet.
> >>> Bumblebee still has some uses and also, the it has the appeal of
> >>> keeping the card completely powered
> >>> off, something that doesn't happen with prime render offload.
> >>>
> >>> Having said that, I do think bumblebee/primus/primus_vk days are
> >>> numbered.
> >>>
> >>> Regards,
> >>> Giancarlo Razzolini
> >>
> >> For clarity :
> >>
> >> Does this affect people without an nvidia card ?
> >>
> >> Are users with an nvidia card that only use nouveau kernel module affected ?
> >>
> > There should be no user visible changes with my proposal - both GL and
> > VK should work as normal. The power management side of things is
> > completely unchanged.
>
> Regarding that last statement I’m not sure. Can you confirm that you can
> unload the nvidia modules in this configuration (using PRIME offloading
> with the proprietary driver through nvidia-prime)?
>
Should work fine, although cannot try it at the moment on my Intel/Nvidia box.
DId you try it and you're seeing issues or there's something in
particular which causes doubt?

> If so we are definitively willing to integrate this in Bumblebee
> upstream, so that people with <Turing or <CoffeLake platform can still
> enjoy power management while finally getting the full power from their card.
>
With all respect to the Bumblebee project and it's developers, I think
the project is dead.
I love the upstream-first mentality, but with 7 local patches in Arch
and the last (merged) MR upstream from 2018 I'm not too hopeful.

-Emil