Fedora 21 Will Try To Abandon Non-KMS GPU Drivers

[cb88]

Yep. While it sucks, there is also nobody stepping up and porting these drivers to KMS either. The plan has basically been let the pre-OpenGL2 class hardware support die off since it's so old.

But there will always be distros that cater to the ancient hardware.

Makes sense to move hardware like that to using BSD... my tyan thunder 2 atx computer acutally has sound support there! And they are still supporting ancient hardware like acceleration support for SX graphics on SparcStations probably the oldest hardware capable of accelerating compositing -> http://my.opera.com/Macallan/blog/

[LinuxGamer]

why UMS for vesa? can they run off KMS too. im saying this because Wayland needs KMS.

you don't need KMS support for Wayland you only need it for Weston

[mark45]

Can't say I like this - I was using r128 cards until earlier this year, so it seems likely that there are still users of them. i810 and Geode also seem a bit odd to me as hardware to abandon support for.

Upgrade your shit or use another distro. Don't be like the ignorant IE6 user who wants his crap to be supported by mainstream as long as he uses it.

Is there some maintenance or performance advantage to having only KMS drivers beyond that of abandoning individual ones?

Take a wild guess Sherlock.

[smitty3268]

you don't need KMS support for Wayland you only need it for Weston

You only need it for hardware accelerated OSS drivers in Weston. Weston/Wayland has a software rendering backend (instead of using GL) which would likely be more appropriate for this hardware anyway, and it won't require KMS.

[intellivision]

Upgrade your shit or use another distro. Don't be like the ignorant IE6 user who wants his crap to be supported by mainstream as long as he uses it.

Are you a maintainer of Fedora?
If not, your opinion doesn't matter. No one has to upgrade their hardware just because you say they have to.
Also, I recall Fedora has a LXDE spin for older machines so it's not as if they're not supporting those users.

[chithanh]

Upgrade your shit or use another distro. Don't be like the ignorant IE6 user who wants his crap to be supported by mainstream as long as he uses it.

Why abandon perfectly functioning hardware? That's what computer users have done all the years when new Windows versions were released and required new drivers, which old hardware would rarely get.

So it's less a case of abandoning these drivers, and more an acknowledgement that they were abandoned years ago?

They are not abandoned, but their pace of development is slow. There were suggestions to integrate these drivers back into the X server like in the old monolithic days, which would maybe be the only long term way to deal with the problem.

[bridgman]

They are not abandoned, but their pace of development is slow. There were suggestions to integrate these drivers back into the X server like in the old monolithic days, which would maybe be the only long term way to deal with the problem.

I don't think anyone cares about pace of development other than keeping up with (ie continuing to work with) ongoing changes in kernel, X server and mesa.

This is the dark side of not having frozen APIs in Linux. Drivers pretty much have to have maintainers or they gradually fall behind and effectively die.

EDIT -- oh cool, I crossed 7,000 posts recently...

[Kivada]

Makes sense to move hardware like that to using BSD... my tyan thunder 2 atx computer acutally has sound support there! And they are still supporting ancient hardware like acceleration support for SX graphics on SparcStations probably the oldest hardware capable of accelerating compositing -> http://my.opera.com/Macallan/blog/

Like I said, theres Linux distros out there that will keep support for ancient hardware, I actually used to run Damn Small on a 33Mhz 486SX with an ATI Mach64 as an experiment, it ran well enough, till the GPU died and I had to go back to the onboard chip.

The thing is though, why you would expect a distro geared toward modern hardware using apps that are likely far too heavy to run well on it, when you could just grab a specialized low end/old hardware distro.

Really though, unless you are dumpster diving for gear to restore and donate like I do the cost of running such old hardware is outweighed by the power savings of getting a system that draws 15w like an AMD A4-5000 board, it'll be faster at literally everything being a a quad core 64 bit CPU with an OpenGL4/OpenCL1.2 class GPU that already has OSS driver support.

[curaga]

It's too bad that Kabini has a GCN GPU - that means the currently-worse-quality radeonsi over r600g.

[chithanh]

This is the dark side of not having frozen APIs in Linux. Drivers pretty much have to have maintainers or they gradually fall behind and effectively die.

Fortunately, and that is the reason for my previous post, is that drivers who are built from the same codebase (such as the Linux kernel, or the old monolithic X) will normally be updated along when an API changes. This prevents those drivers from bitrotting.