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Fedora 21 Will Try To Abandon Non-KMS GPU Drivers

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  • #21
    Originally posted by chithanh View Post
    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.
    They are still probably broken because no one tests them. Sure they may build, but that's about it. It also means things like not running the xserver as root will keep getting pushed forward indefinitly. It also means maintaining tons of crufty old layers in the xserver to support these drivers that are probably also in various stages of decay. Additionally, you can't bang on hw directly from userspace on secureboot enabled systems. Moreover, XAA support was dropped from the xserver years ago so most of these drivers are completely unaccelerated. If you want to use the older hardware, use an older distro or one that caters to older hardware. You aren't missing out any anything ith the newer software stacks anyway since he older cards can't handle it. Do you really think an S3 virge in a 200 Mhz Pentium Pro can handle gnome shell or kwin, or even xfce?

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    • #22
      Originally posted by agd5f View Post
      Additionally, you can't bang on hw directly from userspace on secureboot enabled systems.
      You are right, but then again systems which still contain such old graphics probably don't have secureboot.
      Originally posted by agd5f View Post
      Moreover, XAA support was dropped from the xserver years ago so most of these drivers are completely unaccelerated.
      Even today you find totally unaccelerated display adapters such as the DisplayLink USB devices.
      Originally posted by agd5f View Post
      If you want to use the older hardware, use an older distro or one that caters to older hardware.
      Old distros often have old kernels, so you can't use modern filesystems, they don't have support for modern peripherals, and often no security support, etc.
      Originally posted by agd5f View Post
      You aren't missing out any anything ith the newer software stacks anyway since he older cards can't handle it. Do you really think an S3 virge in a 200 Mhz Pentium Pro can handle gnome shell or kwin, or even xfce?
      Who says they need to handle Gnome shell? Driving a laptop panel at its native resolution, or being able to configure an external monitor would be a start.
      Lightweight desktop environments like LXDE work fine even on a 15 year old machine with 256 MB RAM.

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      • #23
        Originally posted by curaga View Post
        It's too bad that Kabini has a GCN GPU - that means the currently-worse-quality radeonsi over r600g.
        You act like that wouldn't still be faster then what he was claiming to be running, The HD8330 with current state OSS drivers would still be far faster then a Rage128 from around 15 years ago.

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        • #24
          Originally posted by chithanh View Post
          Who says they need to handle Gnome shell? Driving a laptop panel at its native resolution, or being able to configure an external monitor would be a start.
          Lightweight desktop environments like LXDE work fine even on a 15 year old machine with 256 MB RAM.
          Ok, so what happens when you open up a web browser? Just getting a desktop and maybe a very small .doc file open in Abiword isn't enough to justify the power draw over replacing it with a modern 3.9-18w nettop that is faster at everything.

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          • #25
            Originally posted by Kivada View Post
            Ok, so what happens when you open up a web browser?
            Netsurf works fine on low-end devices, thank you.
            Originally posted by Kivada View Post
            Just getting a desktop and maybe a very small .doc file open in Abiword isn't enough to justify the power draw over replacing it with a modern 3.9-18w nettop that is faster at everything.
            Of course the user can compare electricity costs and cost of replacement with something more modern, and may possibly reach the conclusion that buying new hardware is better. But at least the decision is left to the user and he is not forced to abandon his old hardware.

            If electricity bills and IT equipment are paid from different budgets (which is the case in many schools), organizations are even interested in prolonging life of computers beyond where it would make sense if both came from the same budget. Back in the day, I helped a school run DOSVNC on 386s with 4 MB RAM and NE2000 ISA cards as cheap Internet terminals. Bonus, they could be left unsupervised and needed no theft deterrent.

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            • #26
              A very misleading and inaccurate title...

              Fedora is not "abandoning" those drivers at all. The current maintainer of the packages has said he's ORPHANING them, which allows someone else with the time to ADOPT them.

              Fedora isn't removing the packages from the distribution.

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              • #27
                There are only limited resources. Those resources can either be spent making the total experience better for everyone use GPUs that are 10 years old or newer, or they can be spent maintaining support for 10-20 year old cards so someone can still _TRY_ (no one knows if all of these old drivers actually still work) and run unaccelerated X on an old PC. I'm not even sure a modern distro kernel will even boot on older 486/pentium/ppro/etc. CPUs.

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                • #28
                  Originally posted by chithanh View Post
                  Netsurf works fine on low-end devices, thank you.
                  Of course the user can compare electricity costs and cost of replacement with something more modern, and may possibly reach the conclusion that buying new hardware is better. But at least the decision is left to the user and he is not forced to abandon his old hardware.

                  If electricity bills and IT equipment are paid from different budgets (which is the case in many schools), organizations are even interested in prolonging life of computers beyond where it would make sense if both came from the same budget. Back in the day, I helped a school run DOSVNC on 386s with 4 MB RAM and NE2000 ISA cards as cheap Internet terminals. Bonus, they could be left unsupervised and needed no theft deterrent.
                  And if you want to watch a video? I'm not seeing that Netsurf will allow you to download the 340p or lower res videos off of sites, sure theres Youtube-dl, but that only works there and last I checked it doesn't give you the options and versatility that Flashgot and DownloadThemAll do in Firefox. Nor does it appear to have ad blocking so that when a site loads 700 .gif ads it doesn't eat all of your aforementioned 256Mb of ram.

                  Wonderful, ancient equipment that had no upgrade path, fast forward to today, where if you are running Linux on a 15 year old Pentium3 you can just move your /home to a new box that is throughly modern, can run the same software that you are already used to, just at lightning speed by comparison and will last you another 15 years.

                  Clearly you didn't live in the same area that I did, here the students stole or vandalized every piece of equipment, no matter how new or old it was, the school had gear ranging from Apple IIe's and 286 boxes all the way up to indigo iMacs. There where instances of students throwing magnets inside of VCRs or putting them on CRT monitors, gum in the ports and drives, mouse balls stolen and in one instance taking frames from a porno that was on actual film and taped them on the lens of several of the schools light table projectors. There where even a few students that learned how to reprogram the cost per soda on the newer vending machines down to $0.01.


                  The school put in security cameras which where torn off of the wall or spray painted over as soon as they where fixed.

                  And no, the area wasn't high crime, the students where just destructive.

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                  • #29
                    Originally posted by garegin View Post
                    why UMS for vesa? can they run off KMS too. im saying this because Wayland needs KMS.
                    Can they? I think they can't, is there any generic, vesa-like KMS driver on the kernel?

                    Originally posted by dante View Post
                    In few words , Fedora is trying to be buggy as possible
                    On the contrary. Having more unmaintained code (drivers) means more bugs, and better yet, bugs that nobody is willing to fix, because they are unmaintained. VESA, while being generic, should work for everyone as long as it's maintained. Not optimal, but not as buggy as something unmaintained.

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                    • #30
                      Originally posted by Kivada View Post
                      And if you want to watch a video? I'm not seeing that Netsurf will allow you to download the 340p or lower res videos off of sites, sure theres Youtube-dl, but that only works there and last I checked it doesn't give you the options and versatility that Flashgot and DownloadThemAll do in Firefox. Nor does it appear to have ad blocking so that when a site loads 700 .gif ads it doesn't eat all of your aforementioned 256Mb of ram.

                      Wonderful, ancient equipment that had no upgrade path, fast forward to today, where if you are running Linux on a 15 year old Pentium3 you can just move your /home to a new box that is throughly modern, can run the same software that you are already used to, just at lightning speed by comparison and will last you another 15 years.

                      Clearly you didn't live in the same area that I did, here the students stole or vandalized every piece of equipment, no matter how new or old it was, the school had gear ranging from Apple IIe's and 286 boxes all the way up to indigo iMacs. There where instances of students throwing magnets inside of VCRs or putting them on CRT monitors, gum in the ports and drives, mouse balls stolen and in one instance taking frames from a porno that was on actual film and taped them on the lens of several of the schools light table projectors. There where even a few students that learned how to reprogram the cost per soda on the newer vending machines down to $0.01.


                      The school put in security cameras which where torn off of the wall or spray painted over as soon as they where fixed.

                      And no, the area wasn't high crime, the students where just destructive.
                      Normally people don't use an old PC as their exclusive machine. I for one have a Duron as a spare which dual boots Windows ME for old PC games and has an install of Damn Small Linux on another partition for browsing the internet, email and watching the odd TV show streamed over the network.
                      While it only has 512MB of RAM, it runs very well with the old nforce drivers. Newer distros however run like molasses due to the excessive use of software rendering through generic drivers, even with lightweight UIs such as LXDE and EDE.
                      Why should I listen to your incoherent rants and ramblings and upgrade a system that works perfectly fine for me?

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