Mesa To Drop Support For Ancient Drivers

[Zan Lynx]

None of these have KMS support, none of them support anything newer than DirectX 7 / OpenGL 1.3ish, and except for the Matrox G550 none of them exist in PCIE versions. I don't think any of the integrated chips in this list were ever attached to a 64-bit CPU.

I am pretty sure that there were some 64-bit Xeons delivered on boards using an ATI R128 (or something similar) as the integrated GPU.

[nwnk]

How is the moving target of "ancient" defined here, which chipsets will be affected by this? I looked at the links and sub-links but didnt see this more explicitly defined.(if I missed it, I apologize)

It's admittedly a bit difficult to find but the release notes for Mesa 8.0 spell it out:

• Removed all DRI drivers that did not support DRI2. Specifically, i810, mach64, mga, r128, savage, sis, tdfx, and unichrome were removed.

To elaborate a bit:

• i810 means specifically the i810 and i815 chipsets, gen1 in Intel terminology (though that wiki page says i740 was also gen1, which isn't really true, and which we never had any 3D support for anyway)
• mach64 means, well, any ATI Mach64 that was ever supported, which IIRC were only the 3D Rage and Rage Pro chips (wiki thinks the Rage 128 series were in the same generation, which again isn't really true, Rage 128 was more like a Radeon zero-hundred to the original Radeon 7000's R100)
• mga means the Matrox G-series, specifically the G200 G400 G450 and G550
• r128 means the ATI Rage 128 (supra)
• savage means the S3 Savage 3D and Savage 4 chips
• sis means any SiS chip in the SiS 300 range
• tdfx means the 3dfx Voodoos 3 through 5, as a wrapper driver around Glide3
• unichrome means the VIA CLE266 and ProSavage based integrated GPUs

None of these have KMS support, none of them support anything newer than DirectX 7 / OpenGL 1.3ish, and except for the Matrox G550 none of them exist in PCIE versions. I don't think any of the integrated chips in this list were ever attached to a 64-bit CPU. And again, Mesa hasn't actually included any of these drivers since 2012, so this is just removing the ability to load drivers you're already not building.

[MadeUpName]

How is the moving target of "ancient" defined here, which chipsets will be affected by this? I looked at the links and sub-links but didnt see this more explicitly defined.(if I missed it, I apologize)

Are we talking ISA Trident TVGA8800s here, or anything up to pre r600? I see some people refer to first gen radeonsi cards as "ancient", so it would be nice to see who gets affected.

If your device is running fine with a modern disto installed then it will be fine as the drivers were already removed long ago. If your device is never updated and running a 10 year old distro what do you care?

[ezst036]

How is the moving target of "ancient" defined here, which chipsets will be affected by this? I looked at the links and sub-links but didnt see this more explicitly defined.(if I missed it, I apologize)

Are we talking ISA Trident TVGA8800s here, or anything up to pre r600? I see some people refer to first gen radeonsi cards as "ancient", so it would be nice to see who gets affected.

[karolherbst]

As long as the HW remains accessible and functional they can kick whatever they want. But before wildly kicking out stuff and cleaning codebases, there should be drivers in place to take over.

you are free to maintain the code if you need it.

[Vistaus]

But why remove them? I'm sure someone on Phoronix is still using any of these drivers, as always...

[cl333r]

Okay, but since we have DRI3, when can DRI2 be dropped?
Also is there any plans for any successor to DRI3? Maybe a DRI4?

No plans for DRI4 because X11 is dying so there's no point to it.

DRI3 is X11-specific; you cannot 'use DRI2' or 'use DRI3' under Wayland. Mesa implements something which internally looks a bit like DRI3, and other drivers can do their own entirely different things.

-- Daniel Stone[1]

[1]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=101681

[baryluk]

There is nothing wrong with this move. If you have a really ancient graphics card, you can just have multiple installations, use old Mesa, or take an effort to port the driver to more modern DRI. I think it is a good move. The code for older drivers is there, and it somebody really wants, they can be improved and resurrected.

[skeevy420]

Honestly, at this point they should just fork mesa into 2 releases, Legacy and Master and from Master they should remove the whole DRI, XA, mesa IR, drivers, etc etc. and keep the legacy release only for fixes for those with ancient hardware

Heh. Beat me to it.

And that's what I get for using the restroom mid post.

[skeevy420]

I wonder if these kinds of things will become easier if Mesa had LTS releases?

Like stated in the article, only when used in conjunction with GLVND. And, IMHO, this would be something to go into a made-up mesa-legacy package, not mesa-lts.

I don't really think that mesa-lts would be a good thing. Drivers and graphics are one of those things that just needs to be up to date and once the hardware gets to the point to where it isn't made, being used, or has drivers that are so old they get in the way of progress or add maintenance burden, it should be moved into legacy.