EXA Support Finally Comes To The R128 Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: EXA Support Finally Comes To The R128 Driver

It has been fourteen years since the ATI Rage 128 graphics cards were released, but some within the open-source community are still using this vintage graphics hardware and even advancing the ATI driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTEzNDI

[[Knuckles]]

Yes! I have a whole damn pile of them.
PCI, AGP, with hardware mpeg2 decoder, tv out, no-tv out, extra memory, you name it.

Still useful in a bind, when you need a graphics card that you are 100% sure it works on all desktop machines and on all OSs.

[Azpegath]

Pointless waste of resources... 2000 loc for something no one uses anymore.

I kind of agree with you here, those 2000 lines would have been better used to speed up the Radeon cards.

But on another note, did this speed up the old cards? Any performance improvements?

[archibald]

Pointless waste of resources... 2000 loc for something no one uses anymore. Such a shame for this lack of focus! Instead of contributing to advancing linux they waste time implementing 14 year old drivers. Some people take pleasure in uselessness. Who the hell uses that graphics card anymore?

It doesn't matter how many people use it - if that developer used it and thought that EXA acceleration would be useful, why should they not be allowed to implement it? On what authority are you criticising them? (If you actually are their boss, then that's fair enough, you're probably not paying them to do this).

[Azpegath]

It doesn't matter how many people use it - if that developer used it and thought that EXA acceleration would be useful, why should they not be allowed to implement it? On what authority are you criticising them? (If you actually are their boss, then that's fair enough, you're probably not paying them to do this).

Authority to criticize? I see you haven't used this thing called the interwebs since it spawned a couple of yours ago...

[rohcQaH]

Pointless waste of resources... 2000 loc for something no one uses anymore.

Oh noes! Someone used their free time to work on something they liked to work on, instead of using their "resources" to advance the things you care about!

To avoid further pointless waste of resources, I suggest you spend your free time working on modern linux drivers instead of posting here.


Let me just say thanks to Connor Behan. Although I don't use it, I appreciate every developer who goes the extra mile to make sure their personal patches get accepted upstream, so that others may benefit from it. Thanks!

[Azpegath]

Let me just say thanks to Connor Behan. Although I don't use it, I appreciate every developer who goes the extra mile to make sure their personal patches get accepted upstream, so that others may benefit from it. Thanks!

+1, also completely true. The world might not be binary after all.

[kobblestown]

Many a server include an R128 chip on their mainboards. While I think servers should be administered via a serial console (it's a pity PC BIOS settings require a graphics card, but from the boot manager onwards one can get around over serial line only) it's a very widely used chip. All efforts to keep it supported in latest distributions are to be commended.

[AJenbo]

Awsome, i know where i can find a few iMacs with this card embeded Probably also have one or two loos cards in a box some where

[Jonimus]

Woo R128 support! I know of quite a few, still useful laptops with R128 cards in them. Both PPC and x86. The r128 was an extremely popular chip and I'm glad this dev continues work on the X driver. I as others in this thread have a stack of them, two of which are PPC mac compatible. And IIRC AMD has some fairly recent server chipsets with mach64 and r128 based gpu's.

As for the people saying this is a waste of time, I don't see you paying him, so if he wants to work on r128 let him. Now all we need is someone to spend some time one the sis and via chipsets and X11 will once again be king of legacy hardware support with modern software.