Mesa Kills Old Hardware Support: No More 3dfx Voodoo

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa Kills Old Hardware Support: No More 3dfx Voodoo

The death sentence to legacy Mesa drivers was carried out over the night. All DRI1 drivers have been removed from the Mesa tree along with support for BeOS and other old code, in an effort to remove drivers that receive little maintenance and are just causing a greater burden in re-factoring core Mesa code for the modern drivers. This means though that the Linux desktop loses its support for hardware like VIA Unichrome and 3dfx Voodoo graphics cards...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTg0Mg

[curaga]

Some typos: opencl > opencl, and sis cpu > sis gpu.

[curaga]

*opencl > opengl, heh. Typoed my typo fix.

[[Knuckles]]

This means though that the Linux desktop loses its support for hardware like VIA Unichrome and 3dfx Voodoo graphics cards.

Let's not get carried away. The linux desktop looses support FOR DOING 3D in such hardware, a thing that for many hasn't worked correctly in years, and that I doubt even current users of the hardware still use -- even Tux Racer is slow on this hardware.

The most important parts of the software stack for this hardware are the Xorg drivers which provide 2D acceleration and Xv overlays.

These I hope they don't remove because it makes a hell of a difference, especially on old hardware, between having 2d accel or just VESA.
Besides, the whole X stack is supposed to be killed by Wayland, so why not let it all die together.

[madjr]

NO!!!!!!

i had hopes of reinstalling my dusty 3dfx Voodoo !!

man, those were the good ol' times

[Shining Arcanine]

NO!!!!!!

i had hopes of reinstalling my dusty 3dfx Voodoo !!

man, those were the good ol' times

You could complain. Either that or update the codebase to DRI2 and submit patches for support.

[DeepDayze]

You could complain. Either that or update the codebase to DRI2 and submit patches for support.

if you can get that working

[Med_]

The Mesa code-base was trimmed up by over 100,000 lines of code in an effort to modernize the stack and reduce the maintenance burden for Mesa/X.Org developers.

How many left?

[giselher]

How many left?

sloccount in the mesa directory says.

Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
ansic:       722185 (87.60%)
cpp:          71777 (8.71%)
python:       13576 (1.65%)
asm:           7634 (0.93%)
sh:            4713 (0.57%)
yacc:          3683 (0.45%)
lex:            831 (0.10%)
perl:            11 (0.00%)
lisp:             3 (0.00%)

[LEW21]

How many left?

830,969...