Marek Patches A "Mega Radeon" Driver

[dungeon]

Since it encompasses all radeon drivers, why not name it for what it is? radeon_all_dri.so.

Because it won't be for all radeons just for gallium drivers. You have radeon and r200 drivers which are non gallium, classics drivers and this is already done for them .

[staalmannen]

I think this is a waste of time,working on optimization,or broken/non implemented function would be a better use of time.

So go ahead and do that then ... or are you paying Marek for his work?

[s3rg3]

I think this is a waste of time,working on optimization,or broken/non implemented function would be a better use of time.

[r_a_trip]

Rather than calling the mega radeon driver r300_dri.so, I would think just naming it radeon_dri.so would be best.

Since it encompasses all radeon drivers, why not name it for what it is? radeon_all_dri.so.

[Nuc!eoN]

That's over 18MB of disk space for supporting the three Radeon drivers

What's the sense in having 3 graphics drivers installed?

[curaga]

Yeah. For someone who's capable of setting VIDEO_CARDS="r600", this change means that my driver is now 7 MB instead of 6 MB because it supports cards I don't have. I don't care about 1 MB on my hard drive, but 1 MB of RAM seems like a needless waste.

Doesn't look like there'll be an option to compile them separately though.

There won't be a "no megadrivers" option if it gets merged just like classic. But just like classic, you won't be forced to include drivers you don't need. If you check the current classic megadriver, if you have --with-dri-drivers=radeon, there won't be nouveau in that megadriver taking space.

IOW, the filename will change, but if you only include r600, you will only get r600, no size increase.

[dogsleg]

Oh, c'mon, it's just 1MB. We don't live in the '90s anymore

This is all about livecd, which are limited to ~700mb

Oh, c'mon, we don't live in the '00s anymore. How cares for livecd? You can use livedvd or liveusb...

What is more important, as I understand, is that mega-driver is also about security, isn't?

[Spittie]

Yeah. For someone who's capable of setting VIDEO_CARDS="r600", this change means that my driver is now 7 MB instead of 6 MB because it supports cards I don't have. I don't care about 1 MB on my hard drive, but 1 MB of RAM seems like a needless waste.

Doesn't look like there'll be an option to compile them separately though.

Oh, c'mon, it's just 1MB. We don't live in the '90s anymore, you get 512 of those even in ~30? hardware.
Also Marek says that what's missing is mostly build-work, it's clear that he didn't bother adding an option to enable/disable the megadriver, but who wants to get it merged will have to.

I'm asking myself why the distributions install every driver in the first place. I don't need Nvidia and intel (or matrox or S3) drivers if I am using an ATI card but nonetheless they are installed. And if I try to remove them, the packaging software probably wants to remove all desktop and X11 packets because they "depend" on drivers I never use.
But instead of improving their shitty packagers and introducing a hardware detection at installation time - sure, let the upstreamers change everything to save some space (the Windows drivers also include everything for all cards and even a config interface with dependant libraries, who cares about 200MB drivers there?).
If they are so anal about package size, they probably want to shrink their kernel images from 30MB to 2MB first, then we'll talk again.

This is all about livecd, which are limited to ~700mb. You could boot users in vesa mode and download the proper drivers then, but honestly it would be shit experience and a good way to turn away new users.
Removing the drivers from the default installation would save maybe ~30mb of disk space (and not improve ram usage, or speed), and remove one of the nicest features of Linux, which is the ability to take my hdd, plug it into any machine and have it working.

If you really want more control over what you get installed, then Gentoo is for that. Arch too, on a lesser level.

[dungeon]

It is funny what is results of this, for example Debian linked all those i915_dri.so, i965_dri.so, nouveau_vieux.dri.so and radeon_dri.so to the one called r200_dri.so .

So in the end we have only one dri.so for all classics drivers and with this only one for the all gallium dri drivers .

So the best i think for those to just be called: mesa_dri.so and gallium_dri.so

[curaga]

@mark_

You likely know this already, but most users do not know what they need. If the default install does not show a screen, or only ships vesa, they will complain, instead of only installing the driver for their card.