Nearly Two Decades Later, ATI Radeon R300 Linux Driver Sees Occasional Improvement

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New OSes get bloated all the time, Linux included. Here I was testing a ancient C50 CPU and in recent versions of Ubuntu (above 18), Firefox 92 took over 20s to start, ON A SSD!! Opening the simple Wikipedia homepage took over 8 seconds. I decided to go back and discovered that on 14.04, Firefox 66 starts in 5 seconds and opens the page in half the time.

I for one would like to force developers to run under-powered machines on a daily basis, so the brute force approach wasn't used so frequently to resolve bad code.

Now the rant is over, I like to congratulate the devs helping to keep old and useful ATI/AMD hardware alive. Nvidia cards don't have the same driver longevity.

[pmorph]

On the other hand, Windows 10 takes long to boot on HDD..... on a 2.5GHz Core i5.

I think it's the same curse with all of the tech. Basically, the more complex a piece of "machinery", the less the end user will have choice over it's overall composition. And things aren't getting simpler - you need to cater for every juicy feature (almost) no one uses, or be considered obsolete. New nonsense gets added way faster old stuff gets removed, and the way things are, there is no real way around it.

[MadCatX]

We used to have true innovations like accelerated rendering, memory protection, virtual memory, true color, 3D graphics... Now what?

Virtual reality, machine learning algorithms, networks capable of interconnecting billions of devices across the planet (and beyond), advanced data compression technologies for real-time streaming of high quality multimedia? You couldn't do any of than on an Amiga.

... and weeks after PrintNightmare did even worse, is... well, I guess you could say it's "so disingenuous that it is not funny"...

Coincidentally, the PrintNightmare debacle is a result of Windows still relying on code that was designed during that "golden era" of progress which focused on a lot of things but
security wasn't one of them.

[HyperDrive]

I still hope this one will get fixed, eventually… https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/2780

EDIT: Correct link.

[arQon]

This is so disingenuous that it is not funny.

Win 10 also has significantly more features, such as ransomware protection

ROFL. WOW. Having the balls to shit out those two sentences together just months after SolarWinds compromised tens (hundreds?) of thousands of W10 machines, and weeks after PrintNightmare did even worse, is... well, I guess you could say it's "so disingenuous that it is not funny"...

[drake23]

My x800pro ran well with Debian 8. I wonder what would be the recommendation for a distro if I want to try this new code, but only have a 32bit PC with AGP interface?

[sophisticles]

Exactly this. AmigaOS, besides its "crashes are fatal" issue, was capable of everything, and that's on a humble 7MHz 68000.
On the other hand, Windows 10 takes long to boot on HDD..... on a 2.5GHz Core i5.

We used to have true innovations like accelerated rendering, memory protection, virtual memory, true color, 3D graphics... Now what?

This is so disingenuous that it is not funny.

AmigaOS, the first versions that ran on that really old hardware were hardly capable of "everything" because even the hardware was not capable of "everything".

Windows 10 doesn't take that long, but Win 10 also has significantly more features, such as ransomware protection, built in antivirus, built in firewall, built in search, the extensive API's. HAL, etc, than that ancient Os ever dreamed of having.

As for innovations, as computers progress, the potential for innovations shrinks do to the law of diminishing returns, as you said we already have "accelerated rendering, memory protection, virtual memory, true color, 3D graphics", the amount of things left has shrunk and will eventually reach zero.

BTW, if you're so in love with AmigaOS:

https://www.amigaos.net

[tildearrow]

Mutter development seems more about learning new things and padding resumes, not delivering a functional compositor - let alone a performant one, since the CADT process means having a codebase in constant churn, so it never gets to the "Make it fast" stage.

If Mutter ever became "mature", it would simply be thrown away and replaced by a new "better" compositor instead, with even less functionality, more bugs, and even higher HW demands. That's just how it goes.

Exactly this. AmigaOS, besides its "crashes are fatal" issue, was very capable, and that's on a humble 7MHz 68000.
On the other hand, Windows 10 takes long to boot on HDD..... on a 2.5GHz Core i5.

We used to have true innovations like accelerated rendering, memory protection, virtual memory, true color, plug-and-play, 3D graphics, compositing, video coding algorithms, virtual reality... Now what? Chromium embedded framework?

[arQon]

Mutter development seems more about learning new things and padding resumes, not delivering a functional compositor - let alone a performant one, since the CADT process means having a codebase in constant churn, so it never gets to the "Make it fast" stage.

If Mutter ever became "mature", it would simply be thrown away and replaced by a new "better" compositor instead, with even less functionality, more bugs, and even higher HW demands. That's just how it goes.

[stan]

On a R100 (Radeon 7000), using the latest Debian 11 Bullseye you can still run Compiz with all its window wobbling, cube spinning, and genie minimizing glory! Someone needs to adapt the R100-R300 drivers for Wayland and back-port Mutter to require OpenGL 1.3 only. If Compiz, using just OpenGL 1.3, can beat today's Mutter in terms of eye candy, there's no excuse for Mutter not to do the same. In all these years, Mutter has lost features and become more pretentious with its OpenGL requirements at the same time. Unbelievable! It's so sad to see the wrecking of backwards compatibility in Mutter's Git commits. Can't we all just go a little lighter on the planned obsolescence, please?