Southern Islands AMDGPU Support Almost Ready To Roll

[Veerappan]

When did open source drivers ever drop support for GPUs older than 3 years?

No kidding. You can still fire up the old DRI1 drivers with a 3dfx card (or radeon 7000/8000 series) running on Mesa because they still have been intentionally preserving compatibility for old DRI drivers in the mesa stack... The drivers were removed from the tree, yes, but you can still load the old built drivers if you've got one of those cards.

[drSeehas]

... 3dfx card (or radeon 7000/8000 series) ... The drivers were removed from the tree, yes, ...

And these cards were only 3 years old when the drivers were removed from the tree?

[jrch2k8]

And these cards were only 3 years old when the drivers were removed from the tree?

i'm not sure but maybe closer to 15 years than 3 years, some of those cards were so old that originally only supported GLIDE not OpenGL 1.4, even back then were museum cards, in the case of radeons maybe closer to 8 or 10 years(those were 2001 cards with UBER AMAZING 64mb DDR vram)

[Veerappan]

And these cards were only 3 years old when the drivers were removed from the tree?

No clue. Probably not, but I'm not going to bother going back to look. I think it was back in Mesa 8 or 9 that the DRI1 drivers were removed.

The important point is that you can still pop one of these cards into a machine today and get not only a desktop, but accelerated support for whatever GL versions those cards supported (which was usually just GL 1.3/1.4).

In fact, I did that not too long ago. I've got a Voodoo 3 PCI card that I installed into an Athlon x2 machine because I needed something to drive a display. I got a running desktop, glxinfo showed accelerated support, and I got on with my day.

Open-Source graphics drivers generally have much longer lived support than what a manufacturer provides itself. And given the quality of the R600/RadeonSI gallium drivers, I don't really care if AMD provides support in the AMDGPU-PRO binary driver for more than a few years. I haven't installed AMDGPU-PRO yet, and I haven't had Catalyst/fglrx installed since 2008 anyway. I've been using Mesa the entire time, and I've been enjoying the stability, fast desktop, and the rate of improvement.

[dh04000]

When did open source drivers ever drop support for GPUs older than 3 years?

I was talking about the closed AMD driver dropping support and whether the AMD made AMDPRO would do so also. Maintenance is expensive, and AMD has dropped support in the past.

[dh04000]

Ca't find my edit button, Example of support being dropped. Bought a brand new laptop in 2006 with an Ati x1400 and lost support by 2009.

[drSeehas]

i'm not sure but maybe closer to 15 years than 3 years, some of those cards were so old that originally only supported GLIDE not OpenGL 1.4, even back then were museum cards, in the case of radeons maybe closer to 8 or 10 years (those were 2001 cards with UBER AMAZING 64mb DDR vram)

Now contrast this with dh04000s "history and pattern recognition" 3 years.

[dh04000]

Now contrast this with dh04000s "history and pattern recognition" 3 years.

Again, ya'll misunderstood me. Read my last few posts.

[duby229]

Ca't find my edit button, Example of support being dropped. Bought a brand new laptop in 2006 with an Ati x1400 and lost support by 2009.

You do know the open source drivers already well supported that hardware? Honestly I don't understand why you would want to use the old proprietary driver in the first place. It was horribly buggy, unusably so. The radeon oss driver had already implemented AtomBIOS by 2007 and by 2009 was largely feature complete for r500.

[drSeehas]

I was talking about the closed AMD driver dropping support ...

No!
You wrote about the open source AMDGPU driver dropping support.
Please read your own posts.