Mesa Devs Discuss Potentially Dropping Non-Gallium Drivers Or Forking Code For Gallium

[timofonic]

Ban non-Gallium drivers, convert all drivers to Gallium.

Intel was quite retarded in not being a Gallium early adopter. They helped to create this mess.

Resources? What a joke. Any involved company would sponsor this with only their pocket money.

[jrch2k8]

Dropping working drivers for old hardware that still works is fucking moronic.

What the hell is wrong with you people, this is not Windows.

please read the article and its content first, just posting for the sake of posting doesn't help your credibility or image at all.

Second no one is dropping anything from anywhere, jesus seriously read the article.

CAVEAT: in this context maintenance mode means keep it working on modern distro but stop touching and breaking the code NOT ACTUALLY DELETE THE CODE

pasting my previous answer

The point is no matter what happens with gallium3D this old drivers won't pickup new features because most cases the silicon is not even there hence the bigger probability is getting breaks and bugs while impeding performance optimizations on actual modern hardware, is a loss/loss situation.

What Marek is asking is simply this:

1.) Mesa LTS with only(or mostly) legacy drivers in maintenance mode(which i think those people using old hardware will prefer instead of the constant breaks they have now)
2.) Mesa for modern hardware with Nir and Gallium3D.

also remember thanks to libglvnd you can install both and runtime will load the correct version for your hardware, hence for the regular users is transparent as long as your distro include both packages in some form or shape

[rene]

Dropping working drivers for old hardware that still works is fucking moronic.

What the hell is wrong with you people, this is not Windows.

sadly and ironically hardware nowadays works longer in Windows with binary only driver and stable ABIs, than with the ever changing and bitrotting Linux APIs, ... :-/

[RussianNeuroMancer]

sadly and ironically hardware nowadays works longer in Windows with binary only driver and stable ABIs, than with the ever changing and bitrotting Linux APIs, ... :-/

Untrue. Windows 10 keep breaking different legacy drivers twice every year.

[rene]

Untrue. Windows 10 keep breaking different legacy drivers twice every year.

yeah, try use anything not last years on Linux, my ATI Radeon 7500 in a G4 Cube, Matrox, Kyro, ... everything not loved by the big distribution guys get's broken and left behind.

[starshipeleven]

Untrue. Windows 10 keep breaking different legacy drivers twice every year.

It does a good job at breaking normal drivers too. You needed to update to latest NVIDIA or AMD drivers quite a few times in the last 2 years.

[DanL]

It does a good job at breaking normal drivers too. You needed to update to latest NVIDIA or AMD drivers quite a few times in the last 2 years.

Yeah, I held off on the Windows 10 1909 update until I knew my video driver would cooperate because previous upgrades borked it.

[duby229]

Let's not forget that up till very recently Intel was the one holding mesa back, they made every argument they could to not adopt gallium. I think this is fantastic news, but even still most Intel users will likely get stuck with constantly breaking drivers.

EDIT: serves them right for intentionally holding mesa back, but sucks for their users....

[MadeUpName]

Both my laptop and HTPC run i915. Neither one is ever going to get a stunning new life from a driver update. Then again they both work just fine as they are. I'm fine with them being shuffled off to a maintenance branch. Every thing else I have I seem to have to replace the graphics card every 6 months any way.

[timofonic]

Let's not forget that up till very recently Intel was the one holding mesa back, they made every argument they could to not adopt gallium. I think this is fantastic news, but even still most Intel users will likely get stuck with constantly breaking drivers.

EDIT: serves them right for intentionally holding mesa back, but sucks for their users....

I agree!

Intel sucks. That company is governed by egocentric hypocrites.