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

[endlesseden]

I disagree with the sentiment that emulation erases the experience. For me the experience is the stuff I interact with. CRT monitor, old IBM PS/2 keyboard and mouse. Emulation just makes it convenient for me. Qemu-3dfx displayed fullscreen keyboard and mouse bound to the VM makes a very authentic experience, well a little faster in some aspects granted but that can be dealt with in a myriad of ways. I've done commadore emulation similarly and it's still good, albiet a bit strange since my svga crt is significantly better then what I had with a commadore.

That's where we differ, for me the experience is the Hardware. Running classic software, has never been a issue for me. Most of the issues revolving around that are usually modern windows OS issues. As they have terrible backwards compatibility, as they always lack foresight to rush everything shiny to market. Linux on the other hand, has always been decent at running classic windows/dos applications/games under a compatibility layer such as wine.

With pre-IBM era hardware, Emulation is usually the best way to go for the casual experience. As the hardware is often faulty, or relying on moving parts. With often things like worn out magnetic cassette tapes or even reel-to-reel tape as storage. Which is often difficult to maintain or use in our current time.

But we are referring to 20-23 year old tech in this case, most of it is not far off from where we /currently/ are. We havent come that significantly far from the IBM clone days, relatively to say the Commodore 64 days. Most difficult part is maintaining the use of cheap leaded solder and capacitors. Or batteries. Swapping in a modern SSD or even SD/CF card for storage. and you are on your way.

We are talking ATX machines... But the experience on these machines cannot be understated, there is a nostalgia factor from anyone who lived in or around that era emulation cannot scratch. This also erases the understanding achieved by others trying it for the first time. as emulation does not suffer with the hardware limitations or quirks of the time. Which is /part/ of the experience.

Sharing these experiences is important, as it carries weight. Maintaining this hardware on risky older operating systems however, should not be the aim of MESA which they seem to be suggesting. -- landfills are full of stuff like this, which does still have a use.

[Quackdoc]

(Sorry for the several year old necro reply, but it deserved a follow up and i /just/ got to the notification email -_-)


Ofcourse emulation has always been a option, there has been plenty of hardware emulation options over the last decade for a lot of these machines. Im aware of the alternatives, and the nostalgia is not for the games alone. Its for the experience, quirks and limitations.
Emulation looses a lot of that, alongside the excitement of maintaining such hardware, and sharing such experiences with those that never got to.

I dont pull out my 386dx system, or a system with a Voodoo2 as its the only option. i do it, because i want the experience. Emulation just cannot do that, its their goal to erase that, and simplify everything for the modern machine.

---

I strongly believe in the maintenance of historical hardware, with modern software. There is little reason not to, other than a lack of a desire to keep things modular and make everything monolithic again, with even less hardware support... -- Mesa dropped all of this, without considering at all, where this is going. Deprecating hardware drivers simply because they lack features of client software you will never use on them in the first place is pretty stupid. Refactor, and integrate. Their older codebases should be easier now, not harder...

I disagree with the sentiment that emulation erases the experience. For me the experience is the stuff I interact with. CRT monitor, old IBM PS/2 keyboard and mouse. Emulation just makes it convenient for me. Qemu-3dfx displayed fullscreen keyboard and mouse bound to the VM makes a very authentic experience, well a little faster in some aspects granted but that can be dealt with in a myriad of ways. I've done commadore emulation similarly and it's still good, albiet a bit strange since my svga crt is significantly better then what I had with a commadore.

[endlesseden]

(Sorry for the several year old necro reply, but it deserved a follow up and i /just/ got to the notification email -_-)

There are some emulation options that are becoming very useful.

Ofcourse emulation has always been a option, there has been plenty of hardware emulation options over the last decade for a lot of these machines. Im aware of the alternatives, and the nostalgia is not for the games alone. Its for the experience, quirks and limitations.
Emulation looses a lot of that, alongside the excitement of maintaining such hardware, and sharing such experiences with those that never got to.

I dont pull out my 386dx system, or a system with a Voodoo2 as its the only option. i do it, because i want the experience. Emulation just cannot do that, its their goal to erase that, and simplify everything for the modern machine.

---

I strongly believe in the maintenance of historical hardware, with modern software. There is little reason not to, other than a lack of a desire to keep things modular and make everything monolithic again, with even less hardware support... -- Mesa dropped all of this, without considering at all, where this is going. Deprecating hardware drivers simply because they lack features of client software you will never use on them in the first place is pretty stupid. Refactor, and integrate. Their older codebases should be easier now, not harder...

[GKraats]

I was using i915 Gen 3 driver on 945GM chipset at Debian Testing Bookworm.
This driver suddenly was removed by a Debian upgrade. Only software rendering was available.

Although there is a lot of talking here about alternatives like gallium i915g or the classic amber driver,
these drivers still are not available and cannot be tested.

A lot of work has been done at gallium i915, but the final touch still is not done and a release still is not announced.
The software for this i915-driver is available at Debian, but must be compiled manually.

Performance is not the problem.
Big problem is bad support for larger shaders.
The classic i915 accepts every large shader and uses (slow) software rendering if hardware is too poor.
Gallium i915 refuses complicated shaders or replaces large shaders with a standard shader????

[oiaohm]

gen2 seems to be NOT supported by i915g.
"The oldest i8xx hardware would still be using the classic Mesa driver"

all indicate that i915g support only gen3 (as you told me with the help of llvm), but NOT gen2.

Do note the not all gen3 does support opengl 2.0 shaders in hardware. To be correct its 1.3 opengl hardware anything past that it solftware filling in the gaps with intel gen3.

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/me...ff994b45fcbeef Looks like they are going the route of cutting the gen2 into its own driver. So there is going to be a i830 driver again.

https://feedback.wildfiregames.com/r...e/Intel%20845G The gen2 hardware is pre opengl 1.3-4 hardware
https://feedback.wildfiregames.com/r...e/Intel%20915G The gen3 hardware is post opengl 1.4 hardware The early gen3 hardware is not opengl 2.0 hardware.

Do note that the 865G the last of the gen2 is in fact opengl 1.4 hardware but its buggy opengl 1.4 hardware.

In shader hardware supported functionality there is no difference between gen2 and early gen3 intel hardware. The no difference is more insane those who examine silicon from the start of gen2 to I think the second in gen3 the base silicon design of the opengl vertex shader does not change at all. The opengl 2.0 shaders is not the reason why i915g driver does not support gen2 because those have to be software emulated and there is no change in this area between gen2 and gen3. The shader in hardware changes latter in gen3.

Yes gen2 expands in features over its releases this is why the last gen2 is basically the prototype to the first gen3 and the last gen3 is basically the prototype to the next gen4.

You could say the intel gen lines are very much attempts to put lines a progressively changing shades of grey. Like if the Intel 865G design had been perfect out the box we would most likely draw the gen3 line at Intel 865G not the Intel 915G.

When i915g was first proposed it was going to cover gen2.

So we both had something wrong kenren. The reason why i915g does not support gen2 has nothing todo with opengl shaders because there is no difference at the change from gen2 to gen3. It is more having to code around gen2 intel hardware quirks/defects that the latter gen3 don't have. I was presuming due to how small the difference really is between gen2 and gen3 hardware that the original proposal of i915g would have been follow though and so far it has not been.

The horrible part here is there use to be a i830 driver before it was merged into i915 driver that becomes i915c because it was classed as waste of resources maintaining it. Now 2 decades later they are basically reversing the process splitting i830 driver out of i915c instead of expanding i915g to what the original plan of i915g said was the goal.. And of course split gen2 and gen3 at driver level still does not make much sense due to how close in design they really are.

[kenren]

i915g that gen2 and gen3.

gen2 seems to be NOT supported by i915g.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel_i915g_default

"The oldest i8xx hardware would still be using the classic Mesa driver"

Also see:

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/commit/?id=1bf0d869ae07ffc5b9cd79904b421cd37997ae8c

all indicate that i915g support only gen3 (as you told me with the help of llvm), but NOT gen2.

[oiaohm]

oiaohm
You are writing some information that seems to be wrong, please don't give fake information.
R100/R200 was on laptop, for example I have an Apple G3 ibook with R200 on it. Im 100% sure of it.
As I can see i915g support only third generation, not the second generation, where you have found that support montara and almadore GPU?
also, if I'm not wrong, for write a gallium3d driver you need opengl 2+ hardware, since need shader.
However i915g gallium have poor performance compared to dri driver.

Ok that is a powerpc laptop with R200. That interesting. That time frame I was mostly in x86.

i915g gallium driver support intel hardware that does not have a shader. There is a catch here. i915g will expose that it supports opengl 2.x does this by using llvm software rendering.

It can be a good idea to say 1.4 opengl only(MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=1.4) on some hardware.
So i915g gallium compared to the old i915 driver you have to be careful. Yes i915 driver is 1.4 only cannot llvm software render 2.x opengl as the i915g can in places.

Yes there are benchmarks done by phoronix on i915 generation hardware without opengl 2+ hardware shader using i915g.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel_i915g_default

The benchmark here is i915g on apple and other intel hardware that does not have opengl 2+ hardware. The hardware is only opengl 1.4 but i915g reports to software that it is opengl 2.1 cause is the following:
"This Gallium3D driver is a big win since it's much faster for software emulation of vertex shaders and other OpenGL features by leveraging LLVM to cover the graphics hardware's shortcomings."

So you are wrong gallium3d driver by nature will expose opengl 2.1 not matter what evil it has todo. Including software emulation of whatever is missing. Does galluim3d driver exposing opengl 2.1 mean the hardware under it has to be opengl 2.1 absolutely not. Remember option of LLVM emulation making up the difference here.

Most of the benchmarks really did not put the classic i915 and i915g in a fair fight. Most left the i915g driver not restricted to 1.4 so would software emulation when ever benchmark did different opengl 2.1 thing so was of course slow. There have been some fixes with the change of i915g to NIR that have reduced the overhead of the software emulation.

Software emulation does have price.

kenren its really simple to forgot you can do opengl shaders using the CPU and is a feature of the i915g driver. Using the CPU the GPU does not have to have the feature.

[kenren]

oiaohm
You are writing some information that seems to be wrong, please don't give fake information.
R100/R200 was on laptop, for example I have an Apple G3 ibook with R200 on it. Im 100% sure of it.
As I can see i915g support only third generation, not the second generation, where you have found that support montara and almadore GPU?
also, if I'm not wrong, for write a gallium3d driver you need opengl 2+ hardware, since need shader.
However i915g gallium have poor performance compared to dri driver.

[s_j_newbury]

Clearly everybody has forgotten GGI! ;-)

[oiaohm]

There are some emulation options that are becoming very useful. Dosbox has been around for a long time but it has it's limitations. I've had much success and lots of using https://github.com/86Box/86Box recently. I still have some games that doesn't run well in Dosbox but needs a 16bit runtime. Windows 95 and some of my games worked well with 86Box.

I am sorry I am forced to question this.

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Intel_CPUs

There are two programs that have the name dosbox in the emulation space.
https://dosbox-x.com/ people commonly don't try because it commonly not packaged with distributions.

https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.dosbox_x.DOSBox-X

Yes it flatpak install

Yes dosbox-x supports all versions of Windows 95 where dosbox without the X is windows 95 version picky.

The two programs with the name dosbox really do cause some serous issues when people say they got x to work in dosbox and you try it in dosbox and it does not work only to find out the person was really using dosbox-x and left the x off.