Mesa Considers Raising CPU Support Baseline

[NateHubbard]

Why someone in 2021 should still use hardware of 20 years ago ?

For some reason, they always come out of the woodwork when these kind of articles are published.

[bachchain]

Now I'm curious as to what kind of person tries to run mainline mesa on an athlon xp and why they hate themselves so much

[nanonyme]

To be fair, Microsoft also enabled SSE2 on Wndows 7 through security update in one kernel component so it has been bluescreening for years if you have 32bit without SSE2. Very few people cared.

[fafreeman]

i know its not politically correct to say this but people running on ancient hardware... exception are not the rule. its getting to the point where it is holding stuff back for such a marginal, minority. and marginal is the benefit of the doubt because its probably overestimating the amount still on hardware that dates before the pentium 4.

[Adarion]

*comes out of the woodworks*
Here!
Well, as a Gentoo user I frankly don't understand. Generally, it usually is done by your distributor. Those distributors put some "baseline" anyway, for they offer their distribution on amd64 only. Or, they offer it for i686, and then you might have to check with SSE2.
SSE2 forced rules out all Socket A CPUs for example. Athlon, Duron, Geode NX. A lot of embedded ones (Geode LX, GX), older VIA models. And at least for software fallback it sometimes would be good to have mesa there.

On the other hand, in the case of Gentoo, as long as the SSE2 stuff isn't hard-coded, and you just have and use it with you compiler flags (or not), or some other switch to enable/disable these, it's fine. Besides, if one hardcoded SSE-instuctions, it would likely no longer run on PPC, ARM, Sparc,...

[flower]

*comes out of the woodworks*
Here!
Well, as a Gentoo user I frankly don't understand. Generally, it usually is done by your distributor. Those distributors put some "baseline" anyway, for they offer their distribution on amd64 only. Or, they offer it for i686, and then you might have to check with SSE2.
SSE2 forced rules out all Socket A CPUs for example. Athlon, Duron, Geode NX. A lot of embedded ones (Geode LX, GX), older VIA models. And at least for software fallback it sometimes would be good to have mesa there.

On the other hand, in the case of Gentoo, as long as the SSE2 stuff isn't hard-coded, and you just have and use it with you compiler flags (or not), or some other switch to enable/disable these, it's fine. Besides, if one hardcoded SSE-instuctions, it would likely no longer run on PPC, ARM, Sparc,...

Many projects require that you use their preferred compiler flags before reporting bugs upstream.

I remember that from my old gentoo days.

Nothing stops you from using other flags. And many distributions will do that. But then you have to report bugs there and not upstream

[rene]

much talk about a nothing burger, as if anyone anyone would use the default flags, ...!?

[FPScholten]

Now I'm curious as to what kind of person tries to run mainline mesa on an athlon xp and why they hate themselves so much

Simply stated, there are lots of industrial systems, that are build into large objects like buildings running things like heating/cooling, power distribution, ventilation etc. Those are not easily replaced, were meant to last decades or longer and use some sort of display for interaction. The software on those can be upgraded, but replacing the hardware is usually almost impossible unless you replace the entire building installation.

[kpedersen]

Oddly enough I remember when Linux was for enthusiasts with weird, wonderful and "ancient" hardware.

Since when did it change to only become about consumers and gamers who should probably be running Windows anyway?

Sure, they can regress the "baseline" all they want. Other projects that do happen to want to keep the old PPC MacBook or SGI machines will simply pick up the slack and fix the brokenness (probably just a build time flag anyway).

[Slartifartblast]

Why someone in 2021 should still use hardware of 20 years ago ?

My tumble dryer is over 20 years old and has only ever needed a replacement drum drive belt which I did myself, we won't be giving you a membership card to the miser, thrift & recycling club.