Legacy Mesa Drivers Receive Their Death Sentence

[ianromanick]

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.

Wow. That is the most irrelevant comment I've ever seen. We're building drivers for hardware, and the hardware changes. i810 hardware is completely different from i965 hardware. There is no interface that could magically work well for both. As always, patches welcome.

[pingufunkybeat]

Carnal knowledge?

???

[smitty3268]

I'll chime in that I think this makes perfect sense as well. Look at the nvidia drivers, long considered the golden standard on linux. They don't try to cram everything into 1 driver and maintain it all together. They just dropped all the old drivers at one point, kept them in their own package, and made minor updates to make sure they continued working on new x releases. Mesa should do the same - people can keep building Mesa 7.11 if they need support for the old hardware, while new hardware keeps getting updated in the current versions.

Reading the ML, it looks like everyone was in favor of the move except Luc Verhaegen, who thinks it will be a travesty. That's starting to become a bit of a trend, isn't it?

Edit: Oh, and Mesa devs - guess what would make this move seem even more acceptable to the teeming masses. If it came with the same release that bumped the version to 8.0 and added GL3 support. Hint, Hint.

[Med_]

I'll chime in that I think this makes perfect sense as well. Look at the nvidia drivers, long considered the golden standard on linux. They don't try to cram everything into 1 driver and maintain it all together. They just dropped all the old drivers at one point, kept them in their own package, and made minor updates to make sure they continued working on new x releases. Mesa should do the same - people can keep building Mesa 7.11 if they need support for the old hardware, while new hardware keeps getting updated in the current versions.

Reading the ML, it looks like everyone was in favor of the move except Luc Verhaegen, who thinks it will be a travesty. That's starting to become a bit of a trend, isn't it?

Edit: Oh, and Mesa devs - guess what would make this move seem even more acceptable to the teeming masses. If it came with the same release that bumped the version to 8.0 and added GL3 support. Hint, Hint.

I guess what they need to know is whether anyone actually uses 3D on these old chips and at the same time would use a brand new distribution with the latest Mesa? Also as far as i understand 2D would keep working as it did. As Mesa manpower is quite limited if the cleanup can make the developers more efficient so let be it. And yeah doing that with Mesa 8.0 would be neat.

[yoshi314]

Hopefully these old DDX drivers will be killed off too once the 3D drivers go, or just removed from future X.Org katamari releases.

i hope not. after all linux is about supporting as many hardware as possible.

unless using vesa is good enough.

[Kayden]

Edit: Oh, and Mesa devs - guess what would make this move seem even more acceptable to the teeming masses. If it came with the same release that bumped the version to 8.0 and added GL3 support. Hint, Hint.

We're actually quite close...it's entirely possible. :)

[MaestroMaus]

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.

As stated before by Ian Romanick; your servers will remain supported. But I think I could even defend it if they would have dropped those as well. RHEL gives another 7 years of support for these P4's. By that time, your machine is definitively to old to support.

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

...

You clearly have no idea what you are talking about.

[gilboa]

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

...

You do understand that your post (a) has nothing to do with the subject at hand and (b) is borderline bullshit, right?
(Repeat after me: I will not post while being high on [enter name of substance here])

- Gilboa

[curaga]

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.

It was worth it for those with the $new_chips. Entirely not worth it for those with i8xx.

[gilboa]

It was worth it for those with the $new_chips. Entirely not worth it for those with i8xx.

The question is - what is the greater good.
By time Intel decided to remove the cruft, most of the user base of **new** distributions were already using $new_chips instead of obsolete i810 supported devices.
Keep in mind that if you are using an old machine, you're most likely -far- better of with using older, long term distribution (such as SL/CentOS/RHEL as old as 4.x) instead of using Ubuntu and Fedora.

E.g. my PII/333Mhz/MACH64/256MB laptop will most likely use CentOS 5.x till it dies.

- Gilboa