Mesa Considers Raising CPU Support Baseline

[Vistaus]

I'll take it however I want it.


Of course it was obvious to me. Was it not obvious to you that I was being sarcastic?
And clever? LOL. Maybe blurry picture of Linus' middle finger was funny/clever the first 1,000 times I saw it. Now it's just an annoying waste of pixels, especially if it's posted in a vaguely related (at best) topic to what inspired blurry middle finger in the first place.

[Desti]

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.

Why would industrial systems need the latest MESA, if they need MESA at all? Isn't it good enough to freeze an old MESA stage and continue only security fixes for it for support such old systems? Any new software, that would require new MESA will not run on that old hardware anyways.

[Ronshere]

First they took away my HDD
Now I have to toss my Pentium 100

[Serafean]

So the takeaway from this thread is than no one reads the articles themselves.

They are discussing "Default compiler flags". you want new mesa on older hardware? Not a problem, just recompile. The odd bug might appear, but hey, shit happens, right?

[MadeUpName]

Some have also suggested enabling SSE3 / SSSE3 by default for Mesa builds while at it and would still allow for hardware 10~15 years old to still run fine with Mesa's default builds.

It would allow some hardware that is 10-15 years old to run but there is lots only 5 years old hardware that wouldn't. Having said that the only box I have that would be effected would be my HTPC and it really doesn't need to be upgraded as it will be retired long before their is HDR/10bit+ support available in Linux and I don't see any other upgrades coming that would benefit it.

What I am worried about is the idea that they are making a policy decision that your new PC will only be supported for 3 years and then it will be declared obsolete and no longer supported. In a world of hardware shortages and green messages every where it doesn't make sense. Perhaps some one can post some data showing the massive benefits these changes will make that will justify putting us all on a constantly faster upgrade path. On the flip side the hardware manufacturers should stop selling systems that are going to be obsoleted in just a few years.

[dreamer_]

I protest this change. I own a Pentium 2 and an old Nvidia TNT card and i want to still use the latest MESA on my hardware. I don't want to change the compile flags and i don't want to use a distro made for old machines or be stuck in MESA 21.1, there are so many features i could be using, so many optimizations and bug fixes! I thought Linux was made for old computers, wasn't it? I hate you people for excluding such fine hardware from working, this is outrageous. I am going back to Windows XP SP3 that could barely run on my machine anyway.

You got me there for a second But you joke - I had one user sending me almost exactly the same message regarding the FLOSS project I maintain when I decided to change default SSE flags. It was his "ultimate retro gaming machine" - everything older was trash (according to him), and everything newer was trash as well.

[ezst036]

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

That's why so many "come out of the woodwork" as others are pointing out, because people with less than current gen hardware made a home here.

[ezst036]

............. obviously old hardware..............

There goes another useless phrase, meanwhile there are people who are more than happy to define "old hardware" upwards into R600, RadeonSI, Sandy Bridge, Broadwell, even anything pre-Ryzen-class hardware levels.

Those of us who are using blisteringly old ancient Intel 8080(/sarc) hardware see these comments being made, I don't know why those of you using nebulously useless phrases never see it.

[SilverBird775]

While SSE3 is an essential addition to SSE2 (like, Horizontal Add operation is extremely useful and PITA without), SSSE3 is more about math trickery. Raising SSE3 to baseline (Athlon X64 X2, Celeron D, Pentium 4, Via C7 and their other kin) is good enough.

[FPScholten]

I feel Linux should run on hardware older than 20 years because patents last 20 years. You think technology moves fast? Imagine how much faster it would move if patents didn't exist. If I could support a contemporary hardware vendor that only uses patent expired technology, I would, but my performance baseline for general computing is like a workstation from 2013 with support for h265.

So 16 years of patents left to go with the h265 codecs, but by then h268 will be out and would probably revolutionize everything again and increasing the baseline.


Technology only moves fast enough for expired patents to be almost worthless.

You are absolutely right about this. Any technology that gets patented will see little to no advancement at all until the patent has expired. For example, I live in The Netherlands a country famous for its windmills. However, the development of windmill technology in the Netherlands stalled for half a century when a patent was granted to use windmills to drive mechanic tools. It was only when the patent holder died that a variety of new windmills was constructed that made use of such tools, like sawmills...