Mesa's Classic Drivers Have Been Retired - Affecting ATI R100/R200 & More

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa's Classic Drivers Have Been Retired - Affecting ATI R100/R200 & More

The day has finally come that Mesa's classic OpenGL drivers (non-Gallium3D) have been cleared out of the code-base as part of their modernization effort for mainline...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-Classic-Retired

[Mario Junior]

Less 49K lines of code? This is a good thing.

[Quackdoc]

A little bittersweet. As long as I can use both at the same time.

[tildearrow]

And what about Ivy Bridge?
Oh, and of course you had to name it after the person I fear...

[oiaohm]

A little bittersweet. As long as I can use both at the same time.

Some how I am not sure we really will need to.
Radeon R100 and R200 the last time you could get a card of those new was 2004. Old Nvidia cards are in the same age area.

Only thing somewhere need modern is the gen3 Intel stuff that is losing support but we are still talking a decade old hardware at min. Newest being

The another reality here is not one bit of the dropped hardware as a GPU out performs a raspberry pi 4 heck the best is 1/4 of a raspberry 4 GPU performance. Yes the last atom that were intel Gen 3 is from 2010 as they are in fact slower than a raspberry pi 4 in CPU as well.

And what about Ivy Bridge

https://airlied.blogspot.com/2021/04/crocus-gallium-for-gen4-7-generation.html

Crocus is a gallium driver to cover the gen4-gen7 families of Intel GPUs. The basic GPU list is 965, GM45, Ironlake, Sandybridge, Ivybridge and Haswell, with some variants thrown in

Ivy Bridge that comes under crocus going forwards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_graphics_processing_units#Gen4

Yes Gen4 intel graphics starts in 2006 yet Gen3 is made until 2010 but was Gen3 not a power house.

Now that the legacy drivers have been removed maybe someone will work on making patches to crocus to take it back into gen3.

Some of the reason why has been very few people working on the drivers been dropped is there is really not much of the hardware being dropped still in use and if you are using it the hardware in lot of cases is worse than using entry level proto boards. So I am not sure how many people will notice the change in real world usage the effect is going to be close to zero.

Yes running a modern web browser on something like a raspberry pi 4 is not always a nice experience and the dropped hardware will give a user experience even worse.

[gawin]

Tbh even though it may sound bad, there are only positives.

- dri drivers like r100, r200 and etc can still be provided by distros, and changes to newer drivers won't be affecting them (so no unintentional regression),
- it's still possible to send patches for old drivers,
- i965 is replaced by crocus (tested in last months on fedora),
- i915 is replaced by i915g,

[TemplarGR]

If anyone is using obsolete hardware he can remain in MESA 21.3.x forever or use a classic mesa legacy version. Nothing was lost.

[Quackdoc]

Some how I am not sure we really will need to.
Radeon R100 and R200 the last time you could get a card of those new was 2004. Old Nvidia cards are in the same age area.

Only thing somewhere need modern is the gen3 Intel stuff that is losing support but we are still talking a decade old hardware at min.

I have no idea why, I thought cherryview support never got in, but apparently crocus covers it.

I was looking at Gentoo wiki, guess it hasn't been updated.

[zboszor]

And there's i915g (Gallium-based) to cover gen2-gen3. i915g got a lot of attention during the 21.3 development and it's working to the same degree as classic i915 did with less CPU usage than the old one. I can still use this POS hardware with an Atom D525 with modern Mesa and kernel.

[oiaohm]

And there's i915g (Gallium-based) to cover gen2-gen3. i915g got a lot of attention during the 21.3 development and it's working to the same degree as classic i915 did with less CPU usage than the old one. I can still use this POS hardware with an Atom D525 with modern Mesa and kernel.

Thanks I had forgot about i915g that moves the Intel line of unsupported back to hardware that was new in the year 2000-2001 with the last of the gen1 hardware so even worst POS.