Mesa Developers Discuss Dropping Older Drivers, Removing Untested Code

[Sidicas]

Hahaha I still run drivers from 2006 on Windows 10. Can linux run drivers from 2006? NOOOOOO? Linux<Windows

Be more specific, provide chipset/hardware details.

My experience is the opposite.nVidia 980a chipset supported on XP, Vista, Windows 8 but not Windows 10.
AMD Ryzen and the upcoming Intel 299X both require Windows 10. I ran a Catalyst driver on my x700 AMD graphics chip for years and then switched over to gallium and ran it for 5 more years before i gave the hardware away to charity.

Needing to buy new hardware just because Windows 10 doesnt have a driver is a real problem for my dual boot gaming desktop right now because it still runs Vista. Where Vista no longer gets security updates and Windows 10 wont run the hardware.

[cj.wijtmans]

I say modularize all mesa drivers. and this would never be a problem. There are plenty of people that still requires i915

[GI_Jack]

I say clean it up in fork it to a "legacy" project that can be installed side by side for the few people that might need ancient hardware.

[Flaburgan]

There is something thrilling removing old code and making the code base cleaner.

[Aeder]

Hahaha I still run drivers from 2006 on Windows 10. Can linux run drivers from 2006? NOOOOOO? Linux<Windows

I have a capture card whose drivers only run on win 7 32 bits. Neither Win8 nor Win10 can run them (and the 64bit versions even less).

It's plug and play on linux.

[dkasak]

Hahaha I still run drivers from 2006 on Windows 10. Can linux run drivers from 2006? NOOOOOO? Linux<Windows

Trolling is a sign of mental illness.

[pal666]

Can linux run drivers from 2006?

yes, imbecile. even from 1996

[pal666]

Torvalds is a moron because he breaks ABI.

master5000 is a moron because torvalds doesn't break abi

[chithanh]

I would prefer if they kept i915 because my netbook with an Intel Atom N450 processor and GMA3150 GPU depends on it.

Well there is the i915g driver which is not developed by Intel. But in recent releases it broke and as such is a candidate for removal too.

[nanonyme]

The idea seems to make sense. Most of the classic drivers that are still in mesa support DRI2-only, don't use gallium, and receive very little testing/support. Most of the changes to these drivers are to prevent them from breaking the build as API changes, but don't really add new features.

Moving them off to a legacy repository/branch makes sense. It would isolate these drivers from accidental breakage in the master branch. Mesa already has effectively done something like this in the past with the old DRI1 drivers that were dropped back in the Mesa 7.x days. Mesa has kept ABI compatibility in the DRI loader for those drivers, but they haven't gotten new features as time progressed.

I'm not saying that it'll happen, or that it will be perfect, but there is precedent, and those old DRI1 cards do still work using the old driver binaries loaded through a newer Mesa. It's not that these cards won't still work, they'll just be serviced by a driver that changes much less, and is more insulated from upstream changes that are more likely to break them than fix them.

As it was commented in the thread, hiding old drivers in a branch would probably mean they would get even less attention than they do now. Isn't that basically killing then?