Fedora 21 Drops Support For A Bunch Of Old GPUs

While Fedora 20 isn't going to be released until at least December, changes are already ongoing for its successor, Fedora 21. This first major Fedora Linux release of 2014 will abandon support for quite a few older graphics processors.

Back in August I wrote about Adam Jackson's plans to drop support for non-KMS GPUs from Fedora 21. He just wants to do away with all of the open-source GPU drivers that don't have a DRM/KMS driver for modern Linux graphics support, except for the fallback VESA driver.

Well, as of yesterday, Adam Jackson has orphaned the packages prividing support for the APM, Cirrus, Geode, Glint, i128, i740, Mach64, MGA, NeoMagic, R128, Rendition, s3virge, Savage, SiliconMotion, SiS, TdFX, and Trident X.Org DDX drivers. At first there was some concern about dropping the Geode hardware support since there's some OLPC hardware dependent upon it, but for Fedora 21 it will be dropped anyways.

In addition, support for the Intel i810 graphics hardware support has also been removed. The i810 Intel support was via user-space mode-setting rather than KMS with i915 and newer, so Adam killed off this very old (and often buggy) Intel IGP support.

Confirmation of the death of these old open-source Linux graphics drivers comes via the Fedora devel list.