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

[zboszor]

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

This MR: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/...requests/10557

[zboszor]

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

Just move the the driver name i915 from -Ddri-drivers=... to -Dgallium-drivers=... in the meson command line, that's all.

[billyswong]

Another rationale I can think of for the drop of support:

For GPUs that old, they can't run modern GPU acceleration anyway. I looked up wiki and found ATI R100/R200 only supported OpenGL 1.3. Intel Gen1 graphics only supported OpenGL 1.1 + MPEG-2 (DVD) decoding. I don't think anybody that keep those ancient computers are using them for modern gaming / multimedia purpose. If we want to run modern applications on them that happen to draw with OpenGL, llvmpipe is a far more reliable solution as modern applications are unlikely to restrict themselves to OpenGL 1.x.

So, effectively any proper "support" of those old GPUs bring almost nothing to the table in comparison to generic VESA.

[eydee]

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.

It isn't realistic to expect people to rebuy everything on discs for a single PC. This is an EA/Activision way of thinking.

[NateHubbard]

It isn't realistic to expect people to rebuy everything on discs for a single PC. This is an EA/Activision way of thinking.

If you "bought" something without a physical copy, you should expect that you'll eventually lose access to it. That's just common sense.

[eydee]

If you "bought" something without a physical copy, you should expect that you'll eventually lose access to it. That's just common sense.

I'm almost 40 and I'm after the physical copy era. You can't expect gamers to be 70. Also your comment is 100% unrelated to the topic.

[ezst036]

You can't expect gamers to be 70.

It's some hardcore solitaire and bingo players out there.

[Mario Junior]

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

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

Even better!

[microcode]

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

Yes, with glvnd you can have both.

[microcode]

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.

You can literally keep running these drivers as long as you want. They even coexist with the new ones peacefully (due to glvnd).