Legacy Mesa Drivers Receive Their Death Sentence

[cl333r]

Remember how Intel cleaned up its driver stack? People complained but it was worth it, cause now, like a year and a half later, the Intel driver is waaay better.
So I'm all for another clean up.

[DanL]

4 of my servers still have i810 (865G) VGA port. Of course, vesa would do (they are servers after all), but a -lot- of peoples still have socket 478 based P4. Those computers sold for years mostly unchnaged. You could still buy new ones less than 4 years ago (celeron D with 845G). I think it is way to early to drop this driver.

The driver has already been "dropped" for the most part. Ubuntu doesn't even enable it by default anymore (they use vesa). Moving it to a legacy branch doesn't mean it can't be used, though.

[glasen]

The is a big error in the article:

All chips since the i830 (e.g. 855GM, 865G, etc.) do not use the i810-driver in Mesa. They use the newer i915-driver and get still supported by this driver.

BTW:

The 855GM is not that problematic any longer. The only thing is that it only supports OpenGL 1.2 but Unity/Compiz need OpenGL 1.3 (Since Ubuntu 11.04). GNOME-Shell should work because it only uses OpenGL 1.2.

[Elv13]

4 of my servers still have i810 (865G) VGA port. Of course, vesa would do (they are servers after all), but a -lot- of peoples still have socket 478 based P4. Those computers sold for years mostly unchnaged. You could still buy new ones less than 4 years ago (celeron D with 845G). I think it is way to early to drop this driver.

[mistvieh]

I still use a S3 SuperSavage IX/C in my thinkpad and I intend to do so until the device breaks.

At least I can use RHEL6 derivates fotr the next 7 years.

[[Knuckles]]

It's a pity to see these go, I have hardware that uses most, if not all of them (heh crap collector), but mesa is still so behind on so many things that if sacrificing old hardware that no-one uses gives us a better mesa on hardware that people use, I'm all for it.

Most of these are useless even nowadays because the vram on those cards is so little that you have to choose between a decent resolution when connecting these old pc's to a newer monitor, and a low resolution, but having enough vram to fit 3d buffers (last I tried even tux racer crapped on mach64 and mga).

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Legacy Mesa Drivers Receive Their Death Sentence

Last year at XDS 2010 Toulouse there was a discussion about killing old X.Org / Mesa drivers with fire. In particular, dropping all the old drivers that go un-maintained and have little in the way of users and modern functionality. Last year they decided to not really do much about it since these drivers cause little maintenance burden, but the topic has been brought up again and it sounds like these crusty old Linux drivers will finally receive their death sentence...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTgzMg