XAA In X.Org Has Finally Met Its Executioner

[TechMage89]

Honestly, I think most people running such old hardware wouldn't ever need to update X anyway. What benefits would you get from doing so? None of those chips can run a modern DE, and old versions of X are fine for minimalistic window-management.

As has been said before, XAA doesn't actually accelerate anything anyone is using on a desktop anymore (Bresenham lines and onscreen solid fills are more typical of graphical systems from the 80's and early 90's), so chances are you'd get better performance on these machines using a shadowfb (which has also been said before). I really doubt anyone who has been updating their software for the last few years will miss XAA at all, and *most* hardware capable of supporting EXA in a meaningful way already does. As for driver breakage, I imagine most newbie coders could track down all the XAA stuff in the driver and nuke it so it'll compile for a new server without acceleration.

[Pallidus]

with this move you just killed any old laptop that had the misfortune of having first, second or third generation radeon...

try to use exa with rs200 or rv360, I did and it's just painful

a hp and a sony vaio from circa 2004 and 2005 I believe, old? yes . obsolete? they are now thx to this exa

yet you drop any of the old 2008 distros like opensuse 11 and ubuntu 8 that had XAA has the default and it's usable and functions just fine.


I seem to recall the time when linux was old hardware friendly and you could easily run the newest kernel in pentium 2's and shit

sadly those days are long gone

[bwat47]

with this move you just killed any old laptop that had the misfortune of having first, second or third generation radeon...

try to use exa with rs200 or rv360, I did and it's just painful

a hp and a sony vaio from circa 2004 and 2005 I believe, old? yes . obsolete? they are now thx to this exa

yet you drop any of the old 2008 distros like opensuse 11 and ubuntu 8 that had XAA has the default and it's usable and functions just fine.


I seem to recall the time when linux was old hardware friendly and you could easily run the newest kernel in pentium 2's and shit

sadly those days are long gone

Yes, an 7-8 year old computer is obsolete, xaa or not.

[entropy]

Yes, an 7-8 year old computer is obsolete, xaa or not.

Bullshit, how do you come to this conclusion?

I still often use an IBM TP R50p which is almost 9 years old still works quite well for many of my tasks.
Sure, it's not a graphics workstation and does not do well at number crunching...

[Pallidus]

bwart that may be so but I counter that they aren't obsolete but that they were made obsolete.

Let's take this sb pentium4 running at 3 ghz with 1 g of ram and 100g hd: For what I (and I reckon, most people) would use the computer for (emails, web browsing, text editing, mp3 listening, torrent downloading, etc etc) I say that that hp laptop or a sony vaio from 2005 serves the purpose just fine.

There are people in brazil and angola using old ass pentiums just for that.

I understand how electronic and computer companies want you to buy new stuff every 2-3 years or so (1 year in apple's case) but the truth is that with some elbow grease you can keep old laptops running for a long time.

Watching youtube vids doesn't require a 64 bit multi core cpu and 8 gigs of ram or a hd xpto 7437873 radeon ultra bs.

Case in point up until they decided to switch EXA and kill off XAA, I could run linux and run linux well on these machines... now even openbox lags ffs .

So next time you get a hard on for killing some old ass technology that you deem unnecessary just remember you probably deprived a bunch of brazilian/indian/angolan/xxxx people from being able to use the latest kernel


btw I realize that this is a ATI problem and I should avoid ati/amd like the plague but it's still painful not being able to boot the latest versions of distros

[Pallidus]

would also like to share this:

http://youtu.be/sW_7i6T_H78

[Gusar]

Pallidus, would you please read this entire thread? Uninformed rants only make you look silly.

[agd5f]

bwart that may be so but I counter that they aren't obsolete but that they were made obsolete.

Let's take this sb pentium4 running at 3 ghz with 1 g of ram and 100g hd: For what I (and I reckon, most people) would use the computer for (emails, web browsing, text editing, mp3 listening, torrent downloading, etc etc) I say that that hp laptop or a sony vaio from 2005 serves the purpose just fine.

There are people in brazil and angola using old ass pentiums just for that.

I understand how electronic and computer companies want you to buy new stuff every 2-3 years or so (1 year in apple's case) but the truth is that with some elbow grease you can keep old laptops running for a long time.

Watching youtube vids doesn't require a 64 bit multi core cpu and 8 gigs of ram or a hd xpto 7437873 radeon ultra bs.

Case in point up until they decided to switch EXA and kill off XAA, I could run linux and run linux well on these machines... now even openbox lags ffs .

So next time you get a hard on for killing some old ass technology that you deem unnecessary just remember you probably deprived a bunch of brazilian/indian/angolan/xxxx people from being able to use the latest kernel

The old hardware will work just fine with older software stacks. Newer software stacks have heavier hardware requirements as new features are added. Older hardware can't handle all of the new features efficiently. I suppose all software should target 386 processors with ISA video cards with 256K of vram because hw that old could still be in use somewhere...

btw I realize that this is a ATI problem and I should avoid ati/amd like the plague but it's still painful not being able to boot the latest versions of distros

What?! This has nothing to do with any specific vendor. XAA was removed from the xserver; it impacts all drivers that ever supported XAA.

[Pallidus]

that offscreenpixmaps bla bla bla?


I don't need to read that I have the laptops here and the live cd's and even a monkey can tell you that going from 300 fps in glxgears in suse 11.1 and u8 to 25 fps in ubuntu 12.04 means something zigged instead of zagged and the only difference I can perceive is the EXA / XAA thing

if XAA didn't provide any acceleration it certainly didn't lag the whole system like exa did...


btw in my posts there's another thread discussing this and you can use a search engine to see people in ubuntu forums, spanish forums etc etc etc not understanding why their systems started lagging 2009-2010

[Gusar]

that offscreenpixmaps bla bla bla?

First, it's not "bla bla", it tells you XAA hasn't been accelerating anything for years, so nothing is lost by removing it. Second, no, I actually meant something else. So read the thread again. Or rant further, it seems that's the more cool thing to do.