Bug 478384

Summary:	Please find a solution for legacy userspace Xorg drivers (whether now unsupported or bankrupt upstream) or please port the Aspeed ast2500 drivers to the wayland compositor and/or maintain Xorg meanwhile (black screen requiring hard reboot)
Product:	[Plasma] kwin	Reporter:	ytrezq
Component:	wayland-generic	Assignee:	KWin default assignee <kwin-bugs-null>
Status:	RESOLVED UPSTREAM
Severity:	normal	CC:	ngompa13, xaver.hugl, ytrezq
Priority:	NOR
Version:	master
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Other
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description ytrezq 2023-12-11 03:32:57 UTC

The Apseed ast2500 might be very old hardware but it s the graphic card of my 2 year old Intel motherboard with recent Xeon cpus and is still being produced.

The driver is now maintained only for Windows (leaving Freebsd and having only console support on Linux) but it had a dual Linux and Freebsd ports. I m meaning that either you have modeseting or you have to use nomodeset in order to use a window environment with the `ast_drv.so` Xorg  (the kernel drm driver is exclusive of the Xorg driver and it doesn t support Xorg).

So the Xorg driver binary is a old full userspace driver that nevertheless allow playing drm videos that require support from the graphics card for the drm decoding.

Reproducible: Always

Actual Results on Wayland:  
whether modeset is enabled or disabled, screen become black and still stay black even when returning to console (hard reboot required). This is the same thing that happens with Xorg when the driver isn t installed even if you don t use the kernel module compiled from proprietary blobs.

Expected Results:  
Be able to use Xorg until compatibility solution is found in order to be able to use Graphical desktop or have the driver code ported to Wayland.

Comment 1 Zamundaaa 2023-12-11 13:17:47 UTC

Sorry, but we don't maintain graphics drivers. Please ask your GPU vendor for support.

Comment 2 ytrezq 2023-12-11 13:55:48 UTC

As I said,
upstream dropped the support for windowed environnements on Unix with the assumption Xorg remains available.

Comment 3 Zamundaaa 2023-12-11 14:21:53 UTC

Again, sorry, but we can't do anything about that. We don't maintain Xorg, the kernel or graphics drivers.

FYI Xorg will stay available for at least a few years to come, on LTS distros probably for another decade

Comment 4 ytrezq 2023-12-11 14:27:41 UTC

You said you have the intent to remove Xorg support for this release of plasma. The result is major rpms distros are compiling without support for Xorg.

If you don t want to support unsupported hardware, please keep Xorg compatibility.

Comment 5 ytrezq 2023-12-11 14:28:18 UTC

Or introduce an Interface to use Xorg userspace only drivers.

Comment 6 Zamundaaa 2023-12-11 14:38:33 UTC

No, we're not removing Xorg support with Plasma 6.0, that'll still take quite a few more releases. Fedora's decision is independent of that.

To be very direct, your hardware is no longer supported by the kernel, which means you either have to keep using old kernels and distros, or replace your hardware. We can't do anything about that, and we certainly can't and won't support userspace gpu drivers.
Now please stop reopening this bug report, it's not going to change anything.

Comment 7 ytrezq 2023-12-11 14:44:27 UTC

There s nothing linked to the kernel. The Xorg driver is a full userspace driver. It even requires nomodeset on the kernel command line to run.

Comment 8 Zamundaaa 2023-12-11 16:23:18 UTC

Yes, but we only support kernel mode setting, and that won't change. userspace modesetting was obsolete a decade ago.

Comment 9 Neal Gompa 2023-12-14 02:00:37 UTC

Note that there *is* a drm driver for this hardware, it just may not be complete enough: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/ast

And the Xorg driver for AST has not existed in Fedora Linux in ten years: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/xorg-x11-drv-ast/c/9e2c22a20f4e780fe56de994c8116469c83fbfc7

So I think the appropriate response is to contact the developers of the drm/ast driver and ask them to fix the bugs keeping Plasma Wayland from running on it.

Comment 10 ytrezq 2023-12-14 09:03:13 UTC

Please see the attachment on the Fedora bug. Last Graphical driver was compiled for Fedora 29. On Freebsd, there s no more updates since the Xorg driver was abandoned.

It s just upstream is focused on Windows (better support) and dropped the possibility to run a desktop on Linux than supporting Wayland.

There maybe other cases where upstream is bankrupt which makes impossible to even ask getting Wayland running.

Comment 11 ytrezq 2023-12-14 09:06:06 UTC

Though as a userspace driver it still works with any Xorg but using old packages.

Comment 12 Neal Gompa 2023-12-15 02:26:02 UTC

The solution is to move to KMS. UMS has been dead for a long time, even for X11.

Note that the drm/ast driver in the Linux kernel is not developed or maintained by Aspeed, but instead by a member of the Linux kernel community. Please reach out to them and work with them to support your hardware.

Comment 13 ytrezq 2023-12-15 13:27:21 UTC

Either way, then I was talking about the out of tree official dkms Aspeed driver which can be downloaded for current Fedora kernels on the Intel website.

Comment 14 Neal Gompa 2023-12-23 10:30:31 UTC

You are barking up the wrong tree. And given that these drivers are open source and already community maintained, you should be refocusing on asking people to improve the community DRM/KMS driver, not trying to hold onto dead stacks.

Comment 15 ytrezq 2023-12-23 10:49:57 UTC

I m noting a component for Android graphics drivers exist for at least the Weston implementation of Wayland.

I m not aware of the possibility to decode drm encrypted videos with an open source driver. Driver is still maintained by vendor, but only for console mode (no Wayland nor Xorg support through it).