Ancient hardware is already supported perfectly well on ancient distributions. Why spend this much huffing and puffing trying to make ancient hardware work on modern OSes?
Fact is, system requirements are constantly going up. This is true of Mac OS X and Windows, but now Linux has to face this fact. You can't boot up Ubuntu 10.04.1 on the same hardware you could boot up Ubuntu 6.06 on. The kernel is constantly being worked on to gear performance towards computers with more than 2-way SMPness, and NUMA (i.e. Core i3/i5/i7/i9). These performance improvements are definitely helpful for people running newer systems, but they add bloat and slow down ancient systems. In reality, it's difficult to have it both ways, because supporting both the old code and the new in a single codebase is, as Intel is quickly finding out, difficult to impossible.
So I propose that anyone still using an i8xx chipset ought to stick with something like Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, or CentOS 5.x. You will still get very good security updates for a few more years with either distro, and the graphics stack in these distros still uses concepts that the i8xx can cope with, like UMS, OpenGL 1.3, and the good ol' XAA.
I think that trying to pull the current intel code back to the point where it can support the i8xx is going to hinder work on current- and future-gen chipsets, so this is pretty much the best way. OTOH, forward-porting an old graphics stack to the latest kernel and X server might not be impossible, but if it's done I think it should be in its own separate repository. And you'd need a corresponding mesa-legacy and libdrm-legacy for this, because you can't just forward port the DDX, you have to forward port any components it depended on.
I saw this coming the moment I heard Chris was working on bringing back UMS. I knew they would throw it out before it was merged to master.
I have to say, though, that the shadowfb with KMS can be very fast. I've used shadowfb on several cards, and it is marvellous at 2D. You don't need 2d hardware accel most of the time because, let's face it, the CPU is a good blitter for simple GTK and web browsing; this is exactly what was used in Windows and Mac for many many years before beefy video cards were the norm. But even the oldest systems having i8xx would have at least Pentium 4 era CPU, which is plenty fast with standard desktop apps.
And be reasonable, people. If you have such ancient hardware, don't expect to run Google Earth and Unigine and Heroes of Newerth. If you do expect it, you are being unreasonable. Buy new hardware if you want a real 3d experience, or use an old distro if you want to watch a 3d slideshow running Mesa 6.x on your old hardware. Sometimes you just have to upgrade, too bad.
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sigh...
I have one of these "old" chips, I know it's not gaming hardware, but that with my 1.6GHz Pentium M still work just fine - I can surf most websites, play videos, do most office functions, and even play current cool indy 2D games...
So I'd be saddened to be abandoned to a frame-buffer solution and even bit-rotting in some not quite finished rewrite of the Intel driver (if we went that way, I wonder if the old i810 driver could be revived as at least I had TV-out)
I've been reasonably happy with Intel 2.11 KMS on .34, so I assumed we were pretty close (3D even runs for quite a while under a clean profile before it dies). I guess others aren't so fortunate
(I really don't know what the difference is between my main profile/homedir and my test account that allows me to play games for a few hours rather than 2 minutes... but it feeds my hope that we aren't that far off making my 855GME happy enough)Leave a comment:
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Having dealt with one of these chipsets under Windows and being shocked at how shitty it was, I can understand that it would be difficult to make it work properly. Based on what's in this article, I can infer that it would be unreasonably difficult to make these pieces of crap work properly with DRI2 at all. That said, I still have a hard time believing that they can't spare at least 2D acceleration.
Here's my alternative: fork an older UMS driver that worked, make it work reasonably well with modern X server releases, call it "intel-legacy", and don't worry about supporting i8xx in the main "intel" driver. Aim to maintain the level of quality that existed before the KMS switch. Don't worry about making OpenGL play nice with Compiz. Don't worry about supporting OpenGL 2.1. Just make sure that 2D and 3D are acceptably fast. I think that will keep those unfortunate enough to have this hardware sufficiently happy until said hardware dies.Leave a comment:
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LMFAO!
"Duh... we're too dumb to do it the right way, and nobody wants the old way, so here you go.... nothing at all. Enjoy!"Leave a comment:
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Intel Comes Up With An Alternative To Bringing Back UMS
Phoronix: Intel Comes Up With An Alternative To Bringing Back UMS
The Intel Linux driver has been challenged by stability problems and other issues for owners of i8xx hardware since they rolled out kernel mode-setting and Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) support with UXA 2D acceleration more than a year ago. There were initial problems for other Intel users as well when switching to this overhauled driver stack -- to the point that it killed the netbook experience -- but those problems were quickly worked away. But for those using Intel's oldest supported hardware under Linux, the problems to this day remain. To circumvent this issue there's been the approach to add back user-space mode-setting to the Intel driver with EXA 2D acceleration to simply avoid these problems rather than correct the actual issues with KMS/GEM/UXA, but now another alternative has emerged...
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