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

[oiaohm]

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.

Cherryview is gen8 and crosus does not cover that. The intel maintained Iris driver covers cherryview yes that gen8+ as in everything gen8 and newer is covered by Iris.

i915g that gen2 and gen3.
crosus that gen4 to gen7
iris that gen8 to current.

Yes all there are galluim3d drivers. i915g is migrating to using NIR more and crosus and IRIS are NIR drivers as well. So more shared code.

Unsupported is gen1 and powervr horrible.

The reality is the removal of these drivers is not going to result in that much hardware coming unsupported. If we are truthful the bits coming unsupported are not going to give people a good time running modern software that comes with a modern distribution.

The do remember the powervr using atoms and so on was already unsupported before this change. R200 from ATI/AMD would be basically the newest and most power of the bits of hardware being dropped now that I have been reminded about i915g existance.

Of course if someone wanted to spend the time to develop a R100-R200 galluim3d driver with matching Linux kernel space driver mesa and the mainline kernel would not stop them. Same if someone wanted to make a Intel gen1 driver.

[imirkin]

Cherryview is gen8 and crosus does not cover that.

crocus actually does cover cherryview (and iris doesn't). iris covers the other gen8 (broadwell) though. Long-story short, chv has less address space, so iris's pinning strategy doesn't work. crocus issues relocations (as i965 did), so it all works out there.

[Quackdoc]

Cherryview is gen8 and crosus does not cover that. The intel maintained Iris driver covers cherryview yes that gen8+ as in everything gen8 and newer is covered by Iris.

i915g that gen2 and gen3.
crosus that gen4 to gen7
iris that gen8 to current.

Yes all there are galluim3d drivers. i915g is migrating to using NIR more and crosus and IRIS are NIR drivers as well. So more shared code.

Unsupported is gen1 and powervr horrible.

The reality is the removal of these drivers is not going to result in that much hardware coming unsupported. If we are truthful the bits coming unsupported are not going to give people a good time running modern software that comes with a modern distribution.

The do remember the powervr using atoms and so on was already unsupported before this change. R200 from ATI/AMD would be basically the newest and most power of the bits of hardware being dropped now that I have been reminded about i915g existance.

Of course if someone wanted to spend the time to develop a R100-R200 galluim3d driver with matching Linux kernel space driver mesa and the mainline kernel would not stop them. Same if someone wanted to make a Intel gen1 driver.

cherry view is crocus, its gen 8, but hardware wise, closer to gen 7, it was apparently added in 21.2.0.

iris doesn't work with cherryview, never really did work. but thankfully it is in crocus, and apparently vaapi now works when using it to since a couple days ago. so im ready for the switch.

[cl333r]

And what about Ivy Bridge?

I imagine you're asking because you have this hw.
I have a Haswell with Intel graphics on a secondary PC, they're good enough but won't support HDMI properly (the monitor randomly turns off). I had to put in a cheap Nvidia GT1030 and it works well (monitor doesn't turn off anymore).
So I guess one *has* to update at least part of their PC once in 5-10 years...

[tildearrow]

I imagine you're asking because you have this hw.
I have a Haswell with Intel graphics on a secondary PC, they're good enough but won't support HDMI properly (the monitor randomly turns off). I had to put in a cheap Nvidia GT1030 and it works well (monitor doesn't turn off anymore).
So I guess one *has* to update at least part of their PC once in 5-10 years...

It's a laptop I bought only 7 years ago, so no way to put in a card. :P

[darkdragon-001]

Great comments here, which put the news into context. This is background information I would like to read in the article itself!

[Shiba]

So, what exactly is this "Amber" branch and where do I find it?

[TemplarGR]

It's a laptop I bought only 7 years ago, so no way to put in a card. :P

Well, MESA 21.3.x supports your hardware, no? And going forward i am sure distributions will just include MESA classic drivers in a separate package anyway, so nothing was lost. It is not like you expect tons of new features and optimizations on your Ivy Bridge in 2022 and onward....

[smitty3268]

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

It's actually more like 202K lines of code removed.

Looks like gitlab has some limits on the sizes of changes it shows.

[oiaohm]

It's a laptop I bought only 7 years ago, so no way to put in a card. :P

If that was new 7 years ago the item still supported if it was already. All that will happen is change from non galluim3d drivers to galluim3d drivers by this remove long term. Of course there could be some teething problems due to the newer galluim3d drivers not being as heavily real world tested. You are looking for 2000 for Intel hardware at this point that will not be support. The R100-R200 was never used in a laptop. The dropped nvidia hardware was also never used in a laptop.

Non replaceable parts that are coming unsupported that were not already unsupported by this change are pre 2000 stuff.

With the intel hardware vaapi support has not worked with the non galluim3d drivers but vaapi support is coming to more of the galluim3d drivers. So there is going to be more features for people with their hardware from this change.

The reality is the hardware being removed is all quickly coming up on being 20 years old or older than 20 years old. All coming to the point that capacitors and other parts are failing. So physical end of life for anyone who has been using the parts regularly.

tildearrow I don't look at this as going to be a huge change. You have to remember doing this was proposed over 8 years ago as well. The removal has been delayed by 8 years because there was not enough hardware coverage by galluim3d drivers and that coverage was a key condition on when this removal could go forwards.

Yes also another key condition was when the removal was done the removed parts would be put into a side project and maintained lightly for a while to allow people to work around teething problems from moving non galluim3d drivers to galluim3d drivers by being able to go back to the non gallium3d drivers if they have to.

This is a very well planned process. I am not sure that people using 20+ year old laptops are going to care that much.

Also that newer gallium3d i915g and crosus drivers are more power effective than the old drivers so resulting in longer battery life on laptops is also going to be a payback any pain this change over causes.