Mesa Will Not Be Dropping Its Older GPU Drivers

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 31 May 2017 at 07:06 AM EDT. 50 Comments
MESA
While last week was the ambitious proposal to drop older GPU drivers from Mesa including the likes of i915 and R300g -- and possibly branching them off to their own Git branch for continued maintenance by interested individuals -- that proposal isn't going to fly.

There has been some support for the stripping of older drivers from Mesa to focus on more modern GPU drivers and make development easier on these more important drivers, but it wasn't convincing enough for all Mesa upstream developers to back this proposal.

Timothy Arceri of Valve who started this latest proposal has withdrew his idea. He has commented on Mesa-dev following others expressing their opposition:
Maybe you could tell me [how many times people need to say "no" to this idea]? Nobody has explicitly said no. There have been concerns that the reasons for splitting them of are not compelling enough, but nobody has said no, if fact the response is mostly positive.

On the other-hand I've already said I withdraw my proposal. Mostly positive != a straight up yes. I can't be bothered continuing to push the idea, it seemed people were much more receptive in the original discussion. If we would rather carry around these old drivers and continue to degrade them over time then so be it.
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