Mir on vmwgfx

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

On Wed, 2013-11-06 at 09:15 +0100, Thomas Hellstrom wrote:
> On 11/06/2013 12:21 AM, Christopher James Halse Rogers wrote:
> > On Tue, 2013-11-05 at 12:04 +0200, Alexandros Frantzis wrote:
> >> On Tue, Nov 05, 2013 at 08:22:28AM +0100, Thomas Hellstrom wrote:
> >>> Hi!
> >>>
> >>> I'm new to this list and I'm trying to get Mir running in a VMware
> >>> virtual machine on top of the vmwgfx driver stack.
> >>> The idea is to first get "mir_demo_server_basic" running with demo
> >>> clients and then move on to Xmir, patching up our drivers as
> >>> necessary.
> >> Hi Thomas, thanks for looking into this. Feel free to also join
> >> #ubuntu-mir on freenode if you need more direct information.
> >>
> >>> So far, I've encountered a couple of issues that might need
> >>> attention from MIR developers:
> >>>
> >>> 1) function mggh::DRMHelper::is_appropriate_device() in
> >>> gbm_display_helpers.c checks whether a drm device has any children
> >>> except itself. This is not true for vmwgfx, and the server will fail
> >>> to start thinking that our drm device is not appropriate. Why the
> >>> child requirement?
> >> Will take a deeper look, probably an arbitrary requirement based
> >> on what major hardware drivers expose.
> > This requirement is intended to be a rough-and-ready check for “does
> > this drm device have any output hardware”. The physical drm drivers all
> > expose their connectors as sub-objects of the main drm udev node.
> 
> OK. Need to check why they do that. Jakob, any idea?
> 
> 
> >
> > We now also check to see whether any of the enumerated connectors are
> > actually connected, so the udev check should be able to go away.
> 
> Sounds great. IIRC there is an IOCTL to check whether kms is actually 
> supported, that might
> come in handy.

There's a libdrm function, yeah, although I think its semantics have
become ‘is this drm device sane’. It'll return true on drm devices that
don't have any connectors, because the *driver* supports kms.

Hybrid laptops with GPUs entirely disconnected from any display hardware
post-date it :).