Legacy Xorg Driver Removal

Summary

This change will remove the xorg-x11-drv-vesa and xorg-x11-drv-fbdev driver packages, and associated support code from the xorg-x11-server-Xorg package.

Owner

Name: Adam Jackson
Email: ajax@redhat.com

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora Linux 37
Last updated: 2022-04-07
FESCo issue: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
Release notes tracker: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Detailed Description

Fedora's primary desktop environments are moving away from being X11 sessions, to being Wayland servers in their own right. This transition is incomplete, and the Xorg server is still potentially used in a variety of "fallback" situations. In particular the vesa and fbdev drivers can find themselves pressed into use when accelerated graphics is unavailable. Both of these drivers are somewhat deprecated upstream, and the code to reach them is increasingly fragile as it gets exercised less and less.

This change will identify the remaining configurations that can reach these drivers, establish an alternative for display support for each configuration, and then remove the drivers and their support code in xserver.

Feedback

None yet.

Benefit to Fedora

Verified modern supported paths for cases currently handled by vesa/fbdev
Simpler support/testing matrix for QE
One less reason to need Xorg installed at all

Scope

Proposal owners: ajax needs to audit hardware support matrix for cases that can hit these drivers, and the rest of the OS for places that can configure them.

Other developers: Maintainers of other affected components may need to incorporate some changes, and may wish to look for additional support code that can be dropped.

Release engineering: #Releng issue number This is mostly ensuring that the two driver packages are indeed dropped from the compose, etc.

Policies and guidelines: N/A (not needed for this Change) Although this is a system-wide change I don't think there's any real policy impact.

Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

Alignment with Objectives: Yes, we'd be arguably the First to try this.

Upgrade/compatibility impact

For an upgraded system to notice this change, it would need to be already using one of these drivers. For cases we can identify where this would happen without explicit configuration, we will ensure the display is enabled by some other path or documented as no longer supported. However, for cases where the driver is set explicitly in xorg.conf, there is no obviously correct remedy that we could do automatically, and the user will need to fix their X configuration manually.

How To Test

This should fall out naturally from the normal release testing process, but we'll expand the details here as the various configurations are tested and fixed.

User Experience

This change should be largely invisible, but there will likely be observable changes (for instance, if you end up using a Wayland session, $WAYLAND_DISPLAY will likely no longer be empty). These will be documented here as we fix the individual cases.

Dependencies

The kernel may need changes to add more drivers for more situations.

The installer and other system-wide configuration tools should be audited to ensure they don't emit cases that can force vesa/fbdev.

The major desktop environments may need to be fixed to handle more cases, and may wish to drop code to support the old cases.

Contingency Plan

Contingency mechanism: ajax reverts the changes.
Contingency deadline: Beta freeze seems fine.
Blocks release? No. Partial completion is possible.

Documentation

Just this page so far.

Release Notes