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

[oiaohm]

ES1000/RN50 were chips for server consoles. The 3D hardware was not validated on them, so it was never enabled in the driver so you aren't losing anything here.

Am I right in my thinking that running ES1000/RN50 with simpledrm(efi/vesa) is going to make bugger all difference compared to running them with the R100/R200 driver due to how poor that devices functionality really is.

[oiaohm]

EDIT - RN50, not RV50. It was also called RV100 if I remember correctly.

There was also an RV200 but I don't remember the specifics.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?architecture=Rage+6&sort=generation

No the RV100 was using on 4 cards and is a 30 million transistor part. RV200 not right its RS200 its another 30 million transistor part.

Everything else Rage 6 architecture other than the ES1000/RN50 is on a board where the capacitors are questionable due to getting up to 20 years old/end of rated life. Out the complete Rage 6 architecture the ES1000/RN50 is the only 8 million transistor part all the others are 30 million transistor.

ES1000/RN50 is the last of the Rage 6 architecture parts made and it is the weakest by a large margin. For capabilities ES1000/RN50 closer to a Rage 4 than a Rage 6. So like a Rage 4 massively overclocked.

Its really simple to forget we stopped using particular capacitors types in computers roughly 15 years ago because they were found not to have the durability. This change means there is a hardware end of life line on that older hardware without massive reworking. Yes the ES1000/RN50 being release in 2007 is on the right side of that change but everything else Rage 6 is on the wrong side of that change because they were before 2004.

Yes that parts after that change have capacitors that could be good for 30-40 years so could have a operational life for another 10 years means the drivers that are not in the classic pile people have to be setting up to maintain until 2031 atleast most likely 2036. This kind of does explain the push to galluim3d drivers.

[guara]

Remember those caps that were shielded by the motherboard caps so did not show symptoms 10 years ago will start showing symptoms now.

That's exactly why I had to replace the old system with my current Haswell setup. After the motherboard electrolytic capacitors gave up the ghost, all the others did the same.
The 80 GB hard drive and the floppy disk unit survived the adventure though. I couldn't find an adaptor for the floppy unit, but the hard drive still runs.

[oiaohm]

That's exactly why I had to replace the old system with my current Haswell setup. After the motherboard electrolytic capacitors gave up the ghost, all the others did the same.
The 80 GB hard drive and the floppy disk unit survived the adventure though. I couldn't find an adaptor for the floppy unit, but the hard drive still runs.

The thing to remember the R100 and R200 as in the Rage 6 with 30 million transistors the decent ones also had those horrible failing electrolytic capacitors on them due to being protected by the motherboards electrolytic capacitors they have a little longer life.

Yes the dropped Nvidia cards also have those failing electrolytic capacitors on them.

This is why I am not very sure if we have many effected users. To the point the user count could be basically zero or zero very quickly as all the hardware falls over and dies.

Question is really how many people would have reworked those parts with the better type of capacitors?

That the reality the deprecated parts from mesa this time are fairly much parts that had to be reworked so they would be working today.

[agd5f]

Am I right in my thinking that running ES1000/RN50 with simpledrm(efi/vesa) is going to make bugger all difference compared to running them with the R100/R200 driver due to how poor that devices functionality really is.

The native radeon kernel driver should work fine and supports more features than the firmware drivers like vesa/uefi. There's no 3D support, so you'll end up using software for 3D regardless of what driver you use for display handling.

[agd5f]

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?architecture=Rage+6&sort=generation

No the RV100 was using on 4 cards and is a 30 million transistor part. RV200 not right its RS200 its another 30 million transistor part.

ES1000/RN50 was a cut down M6/RV100 based asic. Only display and 2D hardware were validated since it was a server console part. VRAM was integrated into the package which made it convenient for server integration.

[billyswong]

The native radeon kernel driver should work fine and supports more features than the firmware drivers like vesa/uefi. There's no 3D support, so you'll end up using software for 3D regardless of what driver you use for display handling.

The "more features" may make sense in (old) Windows environment as there was GDI hardware acceleration there. Do anyone know if there is X11/Cairo/Skia equivalent of GDI acceleration in those Mesa classic drivers?

[agd5f]

The "more features" may make sense in (old) Windows environment as there was GDI hardware acceleration there. Do anyone know if there is X11/Cairo/Skia equivalent of GDI acceleration in those Mesa classic drivers?

The "more features" I was referring to in the kernel driver was stuff like native modesetting and display output handling. The 2D engine will be used in Xorg if using the xf86-video-ati DDX. There is nothing equivalent for wayland-based compositors. That said for modern desktops, the 2D engine isn't really that useful. In fact, pure software rendering is probably a better user experience in most cases.

[pigpen]

Anecdote : I have some OpenGL classic code. A few years ago the texture mapping became really slow (on sandybridge). A few months ago, it started seg faulting (in i965_dri). I just tried it w/ crocus_dri and everything works fine now ...

[endlesseden]

And now it's impossible to make a retro gaming rig anymore. Windows XP doesn't support Steam, while Linux doesn't support the hardware.

Now we need a 3rd party that makes a Windopws XP/Linux mix.

Crazy enough i was thinking the same thing... I maintain a collection of retro machines for a small computer club and my family. Documenting the history and enjoyment of not only the software but the hardware. | All the WinXP and earlier machines i have linux distro + (windows) installed to ensure that i can deploy updates, etc. efficiently without risking security issues. | i also use them for retro lan-parties, which means running linux and using wine or native linux games, because its plain stupid to risk it otherwise when some games DRM's require internet access..

I dont know how or if this will affect any of these machines, but it worries me that mesa will just abandon the branch and not push any security updates allowing these old unpatched games to fall victim as vectors of attack on otherwise safe but old machines...