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

[oiaohm]

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....

The reality here I only expect MESA classic drivers to be mostly packaged for a short time. As in the teething problem frame when you move to galluim3d.

i915g and crosus combination takes you not 2022 onwards. Takes you back to the 2000. Crosus takes you back to 2006 yes Crosus will be picking up vaapi confirmed. i915g is also in future road-map for this.

Yes new NIR ways of optimising shaders and the like is coming to i915g and crosus because they are galluim3d. So the reality here is old hardware with the new drivers are getting features they never had before. This is resulting in the new drivers being more battery effective than the old ones for the same performance or better performance.

Yes more power effective less heat so longer lifespan of these older parts as well. Only problem is is possible teething problems that will only really be detected once mass deployment is done but those should shake out in a few years. This is why I don't think the mesa classic drivers will remain long term packaged because they will come pointless.

[Adarion]

I wouldn't mind if there was a gallium replacement or something. But completely killing off support is bad.
And not, people should NOT stay with old versions, if there are security fixes, these won't reach old mesa versions.
And no, some hardware can't simply be exchanged (in most thin clients, POS systems, laptops, onboard graphics,...).

[Delgarde]

I wouldn't mind if there was a gallium replacement or something. But completely killing off support is bad.

Usually, projects killing off support for something doesn't actually represent a change in the level of support — it's an acknowledgement that it's been defacto unsupported for years due to lack of interest, and that they're going to stop pretending otherwise.

[Shiba]

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.

Oh! So when mesa 22 comes, should I expect to seamless transition or will I have to do something to use i915g?

[eydee]

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.

[TemplarGR]

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.

Well, you can use old hardware and use old software as well. For example you want to play windows 95 games? Use a 586 pc and install windows 95 on it. It is not like you need to have security fixes on a retro gaming machine? you couldn't surf the modern internet on such an old machine anyway.

I don't understand why people make such a huge fuss about things like this. We are a point where simply emulating windows xp gaming pcs is more than feasible.

[siyia]

Since they replaced i965 with crocus for older Intel igpus , i don't have problem with this change at all. If they hadn't done that, it would have been a total different story.

[Tomin]

How do I check if my GNOME Wayland session is using crocus or classic driver? Before it was easy to just run glxinfo to tell which driver is in use (although I'm not sure if it would have told that difference) but now that doesn't seem to be available (on Arch Linux).

[oiaohm]

I wouldn't mind if there was a gallium replacement or something. But completely killing off support is bad.
And not, people should NOT stay with old versions, if there are security fixes, these won't reach old mesa versions.
And no, some hardware can't simply be exchanged (in most thin clients, POS systems, laptops, onboard graphics,...).

The reality the dropped hardware is all coming up on 20 years old or older. Lot of this hardware will have to be exchanged like it or not. This is things like motherboard failures.

Only gen1 Intel onboard graphics is dropped by this change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ocessing_units
i915g and crosus was started by people who wanted to keep back to gen2 intel alive with modern drivers.

Next do you think the old drivers that are being dropped have been getting timely security fixes even that they were mainline? If you do you are kidding you self. The reality is using the drivers that are moving out to classic for now are a security risk due to poor maintenance. So this is serous-ally to the point investment in new drivers is required. Lot of this has been done for Intel back to gen2. Gen1 is not done but that could change. Same with the R100/R200.

Oh! So when mesa 22 comes, should I expect to seamless transition or will I have to do something to use i915g?

I would not promise 100 percent seamless for existing installs. You might have to alter you X.org configuration to stop using the old driver and move over to i915g. New installs on the old hardware should basically be seamless as they just use the new driver off the start line. Of course there could be a few issues that come out and this is why the classic driver branch will be around for a while to help out in the transition stage if any show stopper bugs come up with the new galluim3d drivers..

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.

Retro gaming rig out of hardware from a time frame with the capacitors don't age past 22 years old before failing. The reality is the hardware from that time frame is not great.

There is serous point here eydee mesa project and the Linux kernel are still open to take new drivers covering the R100/R200 ATI/AMD and Intel Gen1 and Nvidia cards that cease to be covered by mainline mesa drivers. If there is enough people with this really old legacy hardware who are willing to invest to either be a developer or pay a developer the current state can be changed.

There is a old saying no such thing as a free lunch. The reality is if you want to run that really old hardware with Linux is now time to pay up.

Please note this plan to drop these old drivers started over a decade ago.
Mesa Kills Old Hardware Support: No More 3dfx Voodoo

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTg0Mg

Yes this is from 2011. The fact old drivers were going to be deprecated and removed was documented back before 2011.

For us who were paying attention this has not come out of left field. The migration has been well planned. What was possible on the cut list was list 8 years ago. Reality is no one in over 8 years has step forwards to make a new intel gen1 driver or a new ATI/AMD R100/200 driver or update the open source Nvidia driver for old cards.

When there has in fact been over half a decade of notice of this coming and people are acting surprised there is a different problem here. Yes some could land on phoronix and other news sites not covering these planned remove/deprecation notices. Some of it is a blind foolishness that Linux world will keep on supporting everything without investment. Yes the old hardware killed off in 2011 was a warning shot that this would happen that people have ingored.

[sbivol]

I wouldn't mind if there was a gallium replacement or something. But completely killing off support is bad.
And not, people should NOT stay with old versions, if there are security fixes, these won't reach old mesa versions.
And no, some hardware can't simply be exchanged (in most thin clients, POS systems, laptops, onboard graphics,...).

You seem to have lots of incorrect opinions based on wrong assumptions.