Mesa Set To Lose OpenVMS Support

Support for OpenVMS is set to be removed from Mesa due to lack of maintainership in four years and trimming out the OpenVMS can shave just over two thousand lines of code.

Support for the Open Virtual Memory System, a.k.a. VAX/VMS, operating system hasn't been maintained within Mesa since 2008. The proprietary OpenVMS operating system targets VAX/Alpha/Itanium hardware. OpenVMS uses a CDE-derived DECwindows MOTIF user-interface atop an X11-compliant windowing system. The last major release of OpenVMS was v8.4 in June of 2010.

Matt Turner writes on a patch to drop the support, "Not maintained since 2008. Doubtful that it's worked in quite a while."

Seeing this support set to be removed from Mesa isn't a huge loss since OpenVMS isn't a big target, there wasn't Gallium3D support, open-source graphics hardware drivers generally don't target this commercial OS, and the Mesa classic software rasterizer isn't too useful for end-users. Cutting out this OS code saves 2.388 lines of code.