Killing DRM Graphics Cruft With Fire

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Killing DRM Graphics Cruft With Fire

It seems to be a good time to clean-up the Linux graphics driver stack. After old hardware support was dropped in Mesa in August, more Mesa code was dropped, and most recently the classic ATI R300/R600 drivers are to be killed (this is set to happen this Friday). Now Intel's Daniel Vetter is chopping up some DRM code...

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

[jcgeny]

cutting drivers is a real bad things .... i remember dsl distro that uses the 2.4 kernel , so may be instead of having one kernel , it could be good to have 2.4 2.6 and a brand new 2.8 that could be started with the bulldozer and new intel's cpu

[droidhacker]

cutting drivers is a real bad things .... i remember dsl distro that uses the 2.4 kernel , so may be instead of having one kernel , it could be good to have 2.4 2.6 and a brand new 2.8 that could be started with the bulldozer and new intel's cpu

Uh... do you realize that the current kernel is 3.1?
And you seem to have a serious problem with your understanding of what is happening. They are killing off things that are no longer used or no longer maintained. The R300/600 CLASSIC drivers are being chopped off because they have been superseded by G3D supporting the same hardware. That sman memory manager is being cut off because it is no longer necessary (its use has been replaced by drm_mm) -- hardware support is not being lost here.

And further, this drm cut work affects GRAPHICS DEVICES, not CPUs.

[schmidtbag]

Uh... do you realize that the current kernel is 3.1?
And you seem to have a serious problem with your understanding of what is happening. They are killing off things that are no longer used or no longer maintained. The R300/600 CLASSIC drivers are being chopped off because they have been superseded by G3D supporting the same hardware. That sman memory manager is being cut off because it is no longer necessary (its use has been replaced by drm_mm) -- hardware support is not being lost here.

And further, this drm cut work affects GRAPHICS DEVICES, not CPUs.

Very true. Besides, for stuff like SiS and VIA drivers, you're better off using framebuffer/vesa, or some sort of CPU 3D acceleration these days.

[Wubbbi]

For all those guys who are crying because there old, very old, hardware is not working anymore:

Are you kidding me? Go to ebay or stuff like that and you will get a ATI RADEON HD 3*** Card ~20€ ... and thats enough to have a moderate 3D environment. So whats your problem?

In computer Science the process of development is extremly fast. No time to save old drivers or hardware! -.-

[Hamish Wilson]

Besides, a lot of the code being dropped recently may actually improve support for some older hardware. For example, with regards to the ATI code removals a developer commented to say this:

Support for r1xx (radeon 3D driver) and r2xx (r200 3d driver) will still exist, but support for UMS (DRI1) will be dropped. Dropping the DRI1 support will however, allow us to support tiling in r1xx/r2xx with KMS much easier which should bring KMS performance up to or above UMS.

Which is really great news, as someone who owns several R200 cards (Radeon 9000 and 9200 chipsets) and even some old R100 cards (Radeon 7500 chipset) and has a particular fondness for these old radeons (and even has some still in active service, such as in my brother's Dell D600 laptop). I was a bit worried that they seem to have regressed a bit in performance compared to when I was using my Radeon 7500 and then Radeon 9200 full time in 2007 and 2008, but now it makes sense since it was the transition to KMS that slowed things down, and that should now get a bit more attention at some point.

[jcgeny]

Uh... do you realize that the current kernel is 3.1?....

of course i know , but during many years it was 2.2.x then 2.4.x and now with 3.x , it is like 2.8.x .
at the time of 2.6 was active , 2.4 was also evolving ....

most of you should think of the nasa-shuttle that will no longer fly by now but at end was not "repaired" because of its older format for cards . i mean that it was using something like "isa-cards" while the market was no longer building around this connections . so the shuttles was hard to keep going into space...
i mean what is important ? having old pcs still making progress and good job or not ? just because they are old....

[Wubbbi]

of course i know , but during many years it was 2.2.x then 2.4.x and now with 3.x , it is like 2.8.x .
at the time of 2.6 was active , 2.4 was also evolving ....

most of you should think of the nasa-shuttle that will no longer fly by now but at end was not "repaired" because of its older format for cards . i mean that it was using something like "isa-cards" while the market was no longer building around this connections . so the shuttles was hard to keep going into space...
i mean what is important ? having old pcs still making progress and good job or not ? just because they are old....

15 years ago I would totaly agree with you. But not today. Old computer ( and we are talking about computer with an age of 8+ years ) dont have to be supported anymore ( in my opinion ). You can get an moderate office computer with low-end/up-to-date hardware for ~200€ ... thats not much. 15 Years ago I payed like 700€ ( 1400DM ). You still can use Kernel 2.2, 2.4, 2.6 and so on for your old computer. I mean they dont need new features. Just use debian 6.0 and you will have your fun. No need to worry. But just because of old, very old computer we should stop improving software? I think thats the completely wrong way. Buy a new computer and be happy. Everyone can spend 200€ for a computer. Even non-working peoble!

[Hamish Wilson]

You still can use Kernel 2.2, 2.4, 2.6 and so on for your old computer. I mean they dont need new features. Just use debian 6.0 and you will have your fun. No need to worry.

This I have to agree with. You do not need to run Fedora 16 or 17 or Ubuntu 11.10 or 12.04 (or any other modern distro) on older hardware. You can just use older versions, or hop to one of the many speciality distros out there that are created for this very purpose. These distros would probably innately give you a better experience with the hardware anyway.

[droidhacker]

of course i know , but during many years it was 2.2.x then 2.4.x and now with 3.x , it is like 2.8.x .
at the time of 2.6 was active , 2.4 was also evolving ....

most of you should think of the nasa-shuttle that will no longer fly by now but at end was not "repaired" because of its older format for cards . i mean that it was using something like "isa-cards" while the market was no longer building around this connections . so the shuttles was hard to keep going into space...
i mean what is important ? having old pcs still making progress and good job or not ? just because they are old....

You're missing the point (again). THERE IS NO 2.8 AND NEVER WILL BE.
2.6 is not dead. 2.4 **JUST RECENTLY** got EOL'd.
3.0 was forked from 2.6 so that NEW FANCY HARDWARE AND FEATURES will be implemented in 3.x series, allowing old crap to be chopped off with a chainsaw, while 2.6 hangs around to keep the old crap working **JUST LIKE YOU SUGGESTED**.

**** THEY ARE DOING PRECISELY WHAT YOU SUGGESTED ****
Why do you think 3.x exists?

Oh, and do you realize that old hardware will keep working indefinitely on OLD SOFTWARE...?
In other words, 2.4 is dead. You can still run 2.4, it doesn't magically blink out of existence.