Proposal Raised For Dropping Mesa's Classic OpenGL Drivers From Mainline This Year

[Veerappan]

I'll be interested to see where this goes.

I've got a haswell laptop as my work issued laptop. It could very well be that I'll have to choose between using this legacy driver branch, a brand new gallium driver, or maybe Zink on top of the haswell vulkan implementation.

Could be interesting, or terrifying, to figure out what works best.

[Inopia]

Still running on Ivy Bridge on my X230 ThinkPad with no problem. Still performs relatively well but I've been eyeing for an upgrade for a while.

It's just been very recent that there's even been a decent upgrade if you don't care for battery life too much, want 16GB or more ram and good CPU perf on a small ThinkPad. I've also liked the mSATA + 2.5" drive combo.

Seems like the right direction overall though. I just hope distributions are going to support the legacy driver for a few more years since it's still a fine laptop.

[skeevy420]

I wonder what this'll mean in regards to all the v2, v3 stuff in the works. Regarding those that come with iGPUs, seems like half of v2 and all of v1 will be useless after this.

[wizard69]

If they can't finds an active maintainer then it is best to keep limited resources focused on the future!

The bigger problem is that a lot of old hardware, especially laptop hardware is going to age rather rapidly as Apple issues newer versions of Apple Silicon. I see both AMD and Intel having to make massive changes to address power usage in their chips. This will likely mean significant changes in architecture yet again! The result will be old hardware simply not being even remotely competitive.

[robclark]

So splitting the old drivers where there is a lack of hardware to test with from the modern does make sense.

I'm coming to the complete opposite conclusion here.. lack of developer and CI access to older hw actually means splitting the old drivers to an LTS branch is an extremely good idea.. at least if you want older hw to actually keep working.. the LTS branch would be slow moving, and getting necessary security fixes, without getting broken by core changes made in mesa to support newer features, and such. The current situation is that older drivers are not infrequently broken and no one notices.. see https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/..._requests/9220 for example (in that case, the classic drivers were broken for three months!).

[Sonadow]

Please don't drop the i915 and i965 DRI drivers.

My Apollo Lake and Gemini Lake laptops depend on the i965 DRI driver to function. To date, there is still no gallium version of i965, and both the Iris and i915 gallium drivers do not latch onto those iGPUs.

These SoCs are barely even five years old.

If Mesa drops them I'm immediately going back to Windows and permanently leaving desktop Linux behind.

[LinuxID10T]

Please don't drop the i915 and i965 DRI drivers.

My Apollo Lake and Gemini Lake laptops depend on the i965 DRI driver to function. To date, there is still no gallium version of i965, and both the Iris and i915 gallium drivers do not latch onto those iGPUs.

If Mesa drops them I'm immediately going back to Windows and permanently leaving desktop Linux behind.

Both of those GPUs will work with the Iris graphics driver. I am running it right now on my Gemini Lake laptop. Should go back to low power Intel chips with the HD Graphics 400 series so both should be covered.

[Sonadow]

Both of those GPUs will work with the Iris graphics driver. I am running it right now on my Gemini Lake laptop. Should go back to low power Intel chips with the HD Graphics 400 series so both should be covered.

Mine isn't. It insists on using the classic DRI driver.

[mangeek]

I think this makes sense and honestly, I love my old hardware, but -does 3D performance matter- if you're running an old GPU that can't do OpenGL >4.3 or rack-up more than a fraction of a TFLOP? I'd think that just using llvmpipe software rendering would be fine for day-to-day use of these machines in whatever roles they're fulfilling now.

[LinuxID10T]

Just drop them all except i915 – there are a lot of notebooks based on Atom/BayTrail nowadays.

Those run on i965 not i915. Original Atoms ran on it, but not in many years.