Reply With Quote"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
Ken Thompson
Phoronix News Bot
After Dropping Old GPU Drivers, Ian Axes More Mesa Code
Phoronix: After Dropping Old GPU Drivers, Ian Axes More Mesa Code
One week ago Ian Romanick called for old Mesa drivers to be removed from the mainline tree so that Mesa can move forward and be cleaned up to better the support for modern GPUs. These old Mesa drivers were DRI1-only, rarely ever received new work, and were largely for vintage graphics processors that most people haven't touched in years (e.g. the 3Dfx Voodoo days). With most developers approving this move, the old Mesa graphics drivers were removed. Ian Romanick has now moved further along with a slew of new patches to delete more code from Mesa...
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTg1OQ
Senior Member
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
Ken Thompson
Senior Member
He obviously deals with a much cleaner codebase than I do. A thousand lines would be a normal day for me... even when adding new functionality, I'm disappointed if I find I've not managed a net decrease in LOC...Originally Posted by AnonymousCoward
Senior Member
Or a smaller codebase. I imagine if his codebase was big enough, he would also delete a thousand lines a day.
Phoronix Member
Just threw my Diamond Monster Fusion (3dfx Banshee) in the recycling pile today.
Senior Member
Why? Because its 3D driver has been removed?Just threw my Diamond Monster Fusion (3dfx Banshee) in the recycling pile today.
Because you were using it (and its 3D driver) a lot before? You know that Mesa 7.12 is a long way away?
Phoronix Member
Yes. 3Dfx devices used the tdfx driver. Wasn't really useful without the glide lib which Ubuntu didn't include by default (would cause gdm to get stuck in a crash loop if not present).
No. Barely fast enough for OpenArena (and only in 16bpp depths which is all it supported with 3D acceleration). Played a lot of Quake on Win98SE with it back in the day. It's time for retirement to a nice vat of aqua regia in some oriental locale. I sent a bunch of old 3Dfx cards to someone on the mesa dev list for development support but I don't think the individual ever worked on anything tdfx-related.
Senior Member
My point is that throwing the card out *now* is really silly. It probably wasn't useful for a long time, and with the 3D driver only being removed in Mesa 7.12, it won't magically become useless for another long time.
Please at least find someone to give it to.
Phoronix Member
It was useless a long time ago. Have you ever been in a PC recycling shop? They have piles of cards of that generation (also older and newer). I simply went through my large pile of cards and threw out anything I didn't have a use for in the past 5 years. That card has too slow for any modern desktop usage (even old charity systems) and too high of power dissipation for servers. In the context of either use case is it any better than a TNT2 M64, a Rage IIC, or even a Trident 3DImage9850 (which I also have)? None of these or the Banshee can out-perform Intel 8xx series integrated graphics even with the broken intel driver.
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