Legacy Mesa Drivers Receive Their Death Sentence

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Legacy Mesa Drivers Receive Their Death Sentence

Last year at XDS 2010 Toulouse there was a discussion about killing old X.Org / Mesa drivers with fire. In particular, dropping all the old drivers that go un-maintained and have little in the way of users and modern functionality. Last year they decided to not really do much about it since these drivers cause little maintenance burden, but the topic has been brought up again and it sounds like these crusty old Linux drivers will finally receive their death sentence...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTgzMg

[[Knuckles]]

It's a pity to see these go, I have hardware that uses most, if not all of them (heh crap collector), but mesa is still so behind on so many things that if sacrificing old hardware that no-one uses gives us a better mesa on hardware that people use, I'm all for it.

Most of these are useless even nowadays because the vram on those cards is so little that you have to choose between a decent resolution when connecting these old pc's to a newer monitor, and a low resolution, but having enough vram to fit 3d buffers (last I tried even tux racer crapped on mach64 and mga).

[mistvieh]

I still use a S3 SuperSavage IX/C in my thinkpad and I intend to do so until the device breaks.

At least I can use RHEL6 derivates fotr the next 7 years.

[Elv13]

4 of my servers still have i810 (865G) VGA port. Of course, vesa would do (they are servers after all), but a -lot- of peoples still have socket 478 based P4. Those computers sold for years mostly unchnaged. You could still buy new ones less than 4 years ago (celeron D with 845G). I think it is way to early to drop this driver.

[glasen]

The is a big error in the article:

All chips since the i830 (e.g. 855GM, 865G, etc.) do not use the i810-driver in Mesa. They use the newer i915-driver and get still supported by this driver.

BTW:

The 855GM is not that problematic any longer. The only thing is that it only supports OpenGL 1.2 but Unity/Compiz need OpenGL 1.3 (Since Ubuntu 11.04). GNOME-Shell should work because it only uses OpenGL 1.2.

[DanL]

4 of my servers still have i810 (865G) VGA port. Of course, vesa would do (they are servers after all), but a -lot- of peoples still have socket 478 based P4. Those computers sold for years mostly unchnaged. You could still buy new ones less than 4 years ago (celeron D with 845G). I think it is way to early to drop this driver.

The driver has already been "dropped" for the most part. Ubuntu doesn't even enable it by default anymore (they use vesa). Moving it to a legacy branch doesn't mean it can't be used, though.

[cl333r]

Remember how Intel cleaned up its driver stack? People complained but it was worth it, cause now, like a year and a half later, the Intel driver is waaay better.
So I'm all for another clean up.

[DeepDayze]

It is a good idea to remove those old drivers as most people don't have those really old graphics cards anymore. I could live with VESA in my old Thinkpad T23 though

In the same vein, even old hardware drivers that are no longer in wide use within kernel should be removed too...win win

[ianromanick]

4 of my servers still have i810 (865G) VGA port. Of course, vesa would do (they are servers after all), but a -lot- of peoples still have socket 478 based P4. Those computers sold for years mostly unchnaged. You could still buy new ones less than 4 years ago (celeron D with 845G). I think it is way to early to drop this driver.

The 865G actually uses i915_dri.so. We're not planning to kill support for those chips yet.

[squirrl]

This just proves the obvious fact:
............ Developers can't come up with a stable ABI

What was it Tesla said, "My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get a new idea, I start at once building it up in my imagination, and make improvements and operate the device in my mind. When I have gone so far as to embody everything in my invention, every possible improvement I can think of, and when I see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form the final product of my brain.”

Jesus, if only more developers would invoke this carnal knowledge.

Another good one:

"If _________ had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.
I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.”

Substitute a few peoples names in there it gets hilarious.
Torvalds, Cox, Packard

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