Mesa Developers Discuss Branching Off Old Drivers, Including R300g & i915

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa Developers Discuss Branching Off Old Drivers, Including R300g & i915

Days ago was a discussion about dropping older Mesa drivers from mainline while issued now is a more formal proposal for branching off older drivers, including i915g and R300g, among others...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-Branch-Old-Drivers

[boffo]

I have a NV30 device. Never really worked after they restructured the code around 2011.

[jrch2k8]

agreed, they should simply have a mesa legacy with old drivers and mesa-current with newer hardware separately, it would be awesome

[schmidtbag]

This is great - people with older systems no longer have to deal with regressions or larger updates that have no impact on them, and people with newer systems don't have to be held back by outdated hardware.

[cj.wijtmans]

agreed, they should simply have a mesa legacy with old drivers and mesa-current with newer hardware separately, it would be awesome

or they should modularize mesa and have different source repos for different drivers.

[dungeon]

3 calendar years on average and drop a branch, like AMD's proprietary What nVidia do there near same thing, maybe 4-5 years is there and drop... they continue to maintain X/KCL minimal compat in hope that it work and that is, but that is prolonging - branch is off already... they both do branch off or better to say drop in about 3-5 years max 6 years might happen but these are high spikes.

Maybe Mesa should discuss if carelessness or pretending to care of something is an better solution

Ideally anything that is more than 6 years old should be branched off, problem are dev resources to maintain these of course.

But why really that "ideally" does not work? Because (and unlike what happens with blobs) mesa's drivers were not ideal and historically get full API support only after so many many years (some driver didn't get there even then or to relative said "never"), so it make sense somewhat to keep them more

[bridgman]

Looks like the discussion is going in the right direction - keep r300g in the active tree but move radeon and r200 out. AFAICS those are the ones which get broken the most.

[dungeon]

Looks like the discussion is going in the right direction - keep r300g in the active tree but move radeon and r200 out. AFAICS those are the ones which get broken the most.

Last time i tried r200, was mesa 9 something i think, kernel 3.14 i think that was at the time... but right in that 3.14 there was regressions with kernel too, with ttm i think... so i give up testing that.
Even if someone keep these it would be breaken elsewhere, so who cares

The best performing r200 one was with DRI1 latest clear was mesa 7.5... you see it is half working and half broken since forever if you ask me

[eydee]

Most linux games require at least OGL 3.x. R300 era hardware can only do OGL 2.1 or even less. There is really no reason to have acceleration anymore, a decent modesetting driver should be enough for those 5 people who still keep them around for some (non-gaming) reason.

[Tomin]

Most linux games require at least OGL 3.x. R300 era hardware can only do OGL 2.1 or even less. There is really no reason to have acceleration anymore, a decent modesetting driver should be enough for those 5 people who still keep them around for some (non-gaming) reason.

Well, Gnome requires at least OpenGL ES 2.0, if I remember correctly. I think that's reason enough to have acceleration on r300. I know some people using cards with r300 drivers even though I don't personally have any of those anymore.