Mesa Developers Discuss Branching Off Old Drivers, Including R300g & i915

Days ago was a discussion about dropping older Mesa drivers from mainline while issued now is a more formal proposal for branching off older drivers, including i915g and R300g, among others.

Timothy Arceri of Valve wrote the proposal looking to branch off older drivers -- they will be in their own Mesa Git branch and those wanting to back-port fixes or improvements can do so. They aren't being killed, as long as there are interested parties in maintaining them.

The motive for moving out these old graphics drivers is it will become much easier to clean-up the current core Mesa code, a lot of features can then be enabled by default that apply to newer hardware than continuing to add more run-time checks, and removing older code relevant to only these vintage GPUs. These old drivers barely receive any testing as-is on Mesa Git and thus are already subject to breakage and regressions.

Among the drivers that are candidates for removal from main are i915, the old Nouveau DRI driver, R200, Radeon, and swrast. Of the Gallium3D drivers is R300g and i915g. It also looks like the Nouveau NV30 support could be removed too.

More details via this new Mesa-dev series.