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

[Archange]

Le 12/01/2021 à 18:33, Emil Velikov a écrit :
> 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?

I have no laptop at hand to try, but I can ask a friend to check, maybe 
tomorrow. I seem to remember that for the proprietary driver to work 
with PRIME, it had to be loaded before Xorg and could not be unloaded 
afterwards, which would prevent Bumblebee/bbswitch PM to work.

>> 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.

Kind of yes, mostly because we all lost interest in this (no affected 
laptops anymore) and time to work on it (as it moved to low priority).

> 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.

Well, look again, we just merged all patch Debian was caring on top of 
the develop branch, while most Arch patches have been part of the 
develop branch for years. I was suppose to handle the release of 4.0 for 
years, but that never happened. However with the recent pushes around 
Optimus, it might be worth to have a look at it and finally release 
that, maybe with a new transport way better than primus or virtualgl 
(that should have been gone for years…).

Regards,
Bruno/Archange