Farewell To The Classic R300/R600 Mesa Drivers

[bridgman]

i read about cpu emulation for the x1250ati and this card is not a full r300... in the same way they can support r200 to.

Not really. CPU emulation of vertex shader hardware (as required by x1250) is pretty do-able with decent performance if you use the LLVM paths. CPU emulation of DX9 pixel shader hardware (the main difference between r2xx and r3xx) is a lot harder.

[staalmannen]

I am glad. F*ck solaris, f*ck bsd! These are server OS, so they doesn't need 3D drivers at all. If one wants free open-source unix like desktop OS, the choice is simple -> Linux.

I for one would be sad if those alternatives went away. I am a happy Arch Linux user but I think that it is important that there are other independent alternatives (I am personally playing with Plan9 but I am still far from being able to use this as a primary OS), like the *BSDs and the solaris-derived (now illumos-derrived) distros.

What I would like to see is actually *more* diversity on the Linux side - we already have the "kFreeBSD" variants of Debian and Gentoo, and the nexenta illumos/debian hybrid. As far as I am aware, there are no non-GNU Linux OSes (BSD or Solaris-derived userland) out there....

[marek]

Why would anyone be fucked? If he has any issues with KMS on R200+AGP+PowerPC, he won't upgrade to Mesa 7.12. Plain and simple.

Besides, Mesa 7.12 will be able to load 7.11 drivers too.

[curaga]

We haven't killed r200 support, and I don't believe there are any plans to kill it, either. What Eric did kill was old DRI1 support (you can still use DRI2) and old non-kernel-memory-manager paths. Cleaning house, essentially.

For r300 and r600, the Radeon maintainers preferred to kill the classic drivers in favor of the (more maintained) Gallium ones. Since there isn't a r200 gallium driver (and AFAIK no plans to write one), the r200 classic driver stays.

He can still be fucked, as I understand that PowerPC + KMS + AGP is completely broken ATM. This would remove the ums path, which may just be the only usable path.

[Sidicas]

There's nothing the classic drivers could do that the Gallium drivers couldn't..
Surprised they didn't axe R300/R600 classic a while ago..

[Kayden]

I wonder WHEN intel goes gallium..

We still have no plans to do that.

[Kayden]

Killing R200? This mean running Linux on my old Macs is now fucked? No more support for the Radeon 7500 AGP and 9200m GPUs? Yeah these GPUs sucked for 3D since even OpenArena ran dog ass slow, but they did well with making video watchable depending on format without bringing the CPU to it's knees and thus grind the machine to a halt...

We haven't killed r200 support, and I don't believe there are any plans to kill it, either. What Eric did kill was old DRI1 support (you can still use DRI2) and old non-kernel-memory-manager paths. Cleaning house, essentially.

For r300 and r600, the Radeon maintainers preferred to kill the classic drivers in favor of the (more maintained) Gallium ones. Since there isn't a r200 gallium driver (and AFAIK no plans to write one), the r200 classic driver stays.

[Kivada]

no they fix the galium3D +KMS driver to run well with the r200.

they do this in that way: they emulate some openGL exstansions in the cpu to lift up the r200 to an r300 feature set.

Hhhmmm... I duno if these boxes have the CPU to spare lol, 800Mhz-1.2Ghz G4e models...

[Kivada]

Killing R200? This mean running Linux on my old Macs is now fucked? No more support for the Radeon 7500 AGP and 9200m GPUs? Yeah these GPUs sucked for 3D since even OpenArena ran dog ass slow, but they did well with making video watchable depending on format without bringing the CPU to it's knees and thus grind the machine to a halt...

[crazycheese]

They were cut due to maintaince burden.
No one prevents Solaris & BSD to port the G drivers.
No one support C drivers, so they are cut upstream.
There would be no upstream changes anyway. There is no damage for Solaris & BSD.


I wonder WHEN intel goes gallium..